Delimiting Not-Being for Knowing’s Sake
How is it that we are able to know, to say or to think anything about nothing? Aristotle, in the Metaphysics, tries to sort out some of the difficulties that are involved in talking about “what is not.” The failure to distinguish between different senses of not-being across the different categories, according to him, ends in a fundamental indeterminacy stemming from the predication of all possible contraries at once:
For if anyone thinks that the man is not a trireme, evidently he is not a trireme; so that he also is a trireme, if, as they say, the contradictory is true. And we thus get the doctrine of Anaxagoras that all things are mixed together, so that nothing really exists. They seem then, to be speaking of the indeterminate, and, while fancying themselves to be speaking of being, they are speaking about non-being; for that which exists potentially and not actually is in the indeterminate. But they must predicate of every subject every attribute and the negation of it indifferently. (Metaphysics 1007b, 22–30)
We can say, in other words, that a particular subject lacks a particular attribute, or is what it is in virtue of not-being in some limited and specific way, rather than having to accept that it is all contraries at once and, hence, is indeterminate in nature. Similarly, though things are said to be in many ways—as privations, affections, comings-to-be, passings-away, relatives—this is always in reference to substance; negations, then, are always negations of “of some of these things or of substance itself. It is for this reason that we say even of non-being that it is non-being” (Metaphysics G2 1003b10–11).
Aristotle’s various attempts to define not-being constitute a reinterpretation of the understanding of not-being introduced by Parmenides in “On Nature.” For post-Parmenidean thinkers in the Greek tradition, the need to reinterpret not-being arose not only due to the unappealing conclusions to which the Parmenidean position tended, such as the denial of belief and opinion, but also in view of the challenge to the potential for knowledge which it subsequently inspired. Despite the controversy surrounding interpretations of Parmenides’s poem, I will argue that there is a coherent sense of not-being as indefiniteness and indeterminacy which we can discern. In showing why, for Parmenides, the way of ‘is-not’ must be rejected in order to stake a claim to the prospect of knowledge, I hope to provide a context for appreciating the discussion of these same issues in Asian philosophy: to better understand the innovative nature of the philosophical contributions made by Asian thinkers, including Nāgārjuna and Sengzhao, a clear picture of the historical and philosophical development of the difficulties surrounding nothing and not-being is essential.
In order to get a handle on the sense of not-being at issue in Parmenides, we must first examine the difficulties surrounding the interpretation of Parmenides’s poem. We are introduced to the central problem of the poem through the device of a journey it describes. The daughters of the sun bear the poet along a “much famed road” (‘odon poluphēmon) (fr. 1, ln. 2)1 to the “House of Night” (fr. 1, ln. 9), where he meets the Goddess—his interlocutor during the rest of the poem. The Goddess bids him to “learn all things” (chreo de se panta puthesthai), both the way of truth and the opinions of mortals in which there is no true conviction or trust (ouk eni pistis alēthēs). She presents two ways of inquiry or thinking:
ē men opōs estin te kai ōs ouk esti mē einai (fr. 2, ln. 3)
The former, is and is not possible for {it}2 not to be.
Ēd’ ‘ōs ouk estin te kai ‘ōs chreōn esti mē einai (fr. 2, ln. 5)
The latter, is not and is necessary for {it} not to be.
Of these two options, however, the Goddess reveals that only one is a viable path toward knowledge: the latter route is “utterly inscrutable,” both because we mortals cannot gain an understanding of “what-is-not”3 and because “what-is-not” cannot be pointed out or indicated. She further rules out a third possibility (6.8–9), a route of confusion and ignorance that mortals wander confounded, wherein to be and not to be are considered to be both the same and not the same. The poet is counseled to steel himself against the force of habit which quickly leads us to hear and speak along the lines that are proscribed, and instead to employ reason to judge the challenge (krisis) which Truth has issued (7.3–6).
Presented with these alternatives, the main question emerges as to what exactly the two initial “ways of inquiry” are, and the grounds on which the Goddess proscribes the second way. First, we can inquire into the subject of the verb estin. Taking our cue from the poem that describes a journey in which knowledge is revealed to the poet, we can understand the subject of estin as the object of thought and speech, exemplified in Burnet’s translation of the two roads: “[W] hat can be spoken of and thought of must exist, because it can, whereas nothing cannot” (Burnet, quoted in Owen 1982, 15, emphasis added).
The nature of the two alternatives presented by the Goddess hinges on how we must read the verb estin. Those who would take the estin in its existential sense, as advocated by Furley (1989), Gallop (1984), and suggested in remarks by Owen (1982),4 see the Goddess as presenting an exclusive choice that reduces to the strong disjunction that something exists or does not exist (Gallop 1984, 67). From this interpretation of estin, we can understand the purpose of the Goddess’s arguments in terms of ruling out two of the possible answers to the question “does it exist or not?”: an “unqualified ‘no’” and a “qualified ‘no’,” leaving only the third of an exhaustive list, an “unqualified ‘yes’” (Owen 1982, 11). The dismissal of the way of not-being, the first wrong road represented by the “unqualified ‘no’,” is quick, on the basis that what does not exist could not be thought of or spoken about (B. 2.7–8). The first incorrect road, then, represents an incoherent position of absolute nihilism. Parmenides’s treatment of it amounts to nothing more than a formality; it is quickly crossed off the list of exhaustive possible answers to the central question, leaving the more problematic possibility of the second incorrect road, the “Blind Alley” of mortal opinion, introduced by the Goddess in fragment six. This is the route of confusion where the answer to the question is “either yes or no depending on what one is talking about, and when and where” (Owen 1982, 11). What is alluded to here, according to Owen, is the tendency of mortals to want both einai and ouk einai as determined by kind or contingent circumstance: in speech and thought, we try to distinguish existent things from nonexistent things by making claims, such as, “horses exist but unicorns do not,” or “there is snow on the mountain but not here.” However, in trying to draw distinctions between such instances, we cannot help but identify them, on some level.
The second reading of the verb estin that I will consider here, is that which understands the verb chiefly predicatively. This reading is offered by Alexander Mourelatos (1976) in “Determinacy and Indeterminacy, Being and Non-Being in the Fragments of Parmenides.” Mourelatos understands the verb as a bare copula whose subject and predicate complement are “deliberately suppressed.” The two ways, thus, represent sentence frames which characterize the subject in positive and negative terms: ‘is’ or Φx, and ‘is not’ or ~Φx (46). Under this reading, Mourelatos suggests, the negative way is too vague and would be without termination: like being told to go to ‘not-Ithaca,’ the way of ‘is not’ would entail a journey whose object cannot be correctly “determined, fixed or encompassed.” In other words, negative specification must be relinquished from the start since it can go on ad infinitum without actually telling us anything. Mourelatos attributes Parmenides’s desire to avoid the indeterminacy latent in the negative way, on the one hand, to a kind of psychological aversion to the “horrors of the apeiron,” which he posits as “closer to Parmenides’ philosophic consciousness than worries about the ontological status of non-existent entities or negative facts” (50).
On the other hand, Parmenides lacks, according to Mourelatos (1976), a conception of the world as “logos-textured,” in which every concept has a privative that delimits negative predication to a distinct domain of meaning, which it is allowed to specify (51). For example, the expression “not-Athena” is unhelpful and vague without an understanding of the context in which it is employed, viz., in the absence of “an analysis of proper names in terms of definite descriptions” that could point to “relevantly contrastive relationships” among concepts, delimiting the range of possibilities to which the expression applies (53). If Pegasus, Diotima, Ithaca, Hera, and Aphrodite can all be described as “not-Athena,” then the sentence “Paris gave the apple to not-Athena” tells us very little in the absence of further information about context and an understanding of the privative function of ‘not-Athena,’ viz., an understanding of the scope of the negation. For instance, is “not-Athena” a goddess other than Athena, a female other than Athena, or a divine being other than Athena?
Using this analysis of the way of ‘is not’ in light of the predicative sense of the verb, Mourelatos (1976) distinguishes between two senses of ‘not-being’ in the poem. Not-being as the opposite of ‘what-is’ emerges as limitless indeterminacy, which reveals itself epistemologically as an “incurable vagueness” (54). This is the “inscrutable” and uninformative track that must be avoided for knowledge to be possible. Not-being, however, also exists in more limited contexts, in the “relatively bounded” not-being present in judgments of mortal opinion (doxa): “‘Doxa’ posits pairwise dependent incomplete things each of which has a character that can only be defined by negative reference to its paired ‘other’” (59). The disjunction here is not an absolute one, since there is a mixing of opposites. Mourelatos takes up the imagery of the text to show how it parallels the two senses which he describes. He contrasts the directed “pointing out” of Truth, which he characterizes as “centripetal and target-oriented,” whose object is what-is, to the wandering vagaries of Doxa, described in terms of “un-targeted [cf. B7.4 askopon omma, untargeted eye] and centrifugal” (59), which meanders toward the indeterminate and inchoate. Mourelatos’s reading is explained in detail and carefully defended in several of his texts, but it is important to note as reason to give pause that such an impersonal use of the verb is without parallel in Greek (Kahn 1968/1969, 709n12). Furley (1989) points out, in a similarly problematic vein, that those described in the sixth fragment as eidotes ouden “are surely men who know nothing, not men who know ‘the so-and-so which really is not such-and-such’ or the ‘such-and-such that so-and-so really is not’” (36). In other words, there are instances within the poem itself where Mourelatos’s (1976) preferred reading of the verb is frustrated by the implied meaning of the passage, which demands an explicitly existential understanding of the verb. While Mourelatos’s predicative reading of the verb suggests a subtle, psychological answer to why the way of “is-not” must be rejected as unthinkable and unknowable, textual concerns regarding his reading the verb in an exclusively predicative sense, to which I have merely gestured here in passing, must give us pause.
The interpretative difficulties that arise when we try to take the verb as exclusively existential or predicative recommend an understanding of estin as ‘fused’.5 On this account, existential uses of the verb remain the same, while predicative or copulative uses of it can be rephrased in existential terms; hence, statements such as tauta esti should be understood as “these things are the case” or “these things exist,” while “this is sweet” could be construed as “there is sweetness here” (Furth 1968, 123–124). Accepting that the verb admits both predicative and existential senses allows us to distinguish two levels of description when it comes to the being in question: determinacy versus indeterminacy from the predicative sense of the verb, and definiteness versus indefiniteness from the existential sense of the verb. We can define these descriptive continua as follows:
Determinacy: Conveyed by the predicative sense of the verb, determinacy consists in the existence of a thing as it constitutes a subject for predication and an object of language and thought.
What is determinate admits of being predicated and specified and, thus, is knowable and semantically distinct. The indeterminate, conversely, cannot be specified in conception and speech, thus emerging, as Mourelatos speculates, as a kind of semantic vagueness. We can think of determinate objects like a robin’s egg about which we can make specific claims, such as “this robin’s egg is fifteen millimeters in diameter,” and “this robin’s egg is a lovely shade of blue”; conversely, we can make some claims about indeterminate objects, such as “the crowd today was larger than yesterday’s,” and “the pile of socks in my room is growing”; but often, the ability to make such claims is undermined by the amorphous nature of the indeterminate thing as a subject for predication. For example, it is difficult to say exactly what a distant rumble “sounds” like.
Definiteness: Conveyed by the existential sense of the verb, definiteness specifies the existence of a thing viewed from the perspective of its ontological distinctness.
That which is definite is most real and exists most truly. That which is indefinite has less real, perhaps only conceptual existence. Definite things include those that we bump up against in the ‘real’ world—the Statue of Liberty, a persimmon, my mother. Indefinite things, on the other hand, occupy a continuum of reality, ranging from a movie projection and time zones to mermaids, unicorns, and imaginary friends.
From the two levels of existence emerge four possible combinations:
It is these four possibilities that underlie Parmenides’s specification of the possible ways of knowing. The first, the definite and determinate describes that which exists most definitely and distinctly and most admits of being known. For Parmenides, this, most properly, is Being. The last of the four possibilities, the indefinite and indeterminate, characterizes not-Being: as pure negation, it lacks distinctness and has no ontological status; while as utter indeterminacy, it is recalcitrant to being captured in speech and thought. The two middle alternatives can be inferred as the objects of doxa, representing—as Owen (1971) says—“qualified not-Being.” The indefinite and determinate constitute nonexistent, conceptual entities which can still be the object of language and thought; hence, we can tell vivid tales about unicorns and mermaids, but are hard pressed to produce either one at the dinner table. The definite and the indeterminate, on the other hand, describe existent things, those with more than just conceptual existence. We do not attach predicates and attributes to these, either because we cannot do so—the thing lacks any defining characteristics besides the fact that it is indistinguishable—or, because it does not merit such specification, the thing is not identical with anything that we consider important or worthy of attention. Examples of the definite but indeterminate can be drawn from the use of “nothing” when it is not meant to dispute the existence of the thing in question:6 if I hear a distant humming and ask, “What is that?” the reply, “Nothing,” does not deny the existence of the sound but denies that it could be of anything in particular, it is just some indeterminate rumble; or, “nothing” in this context could also mean, ‘It is not anything of importance or concern to us,” or “No, it’s not an axe-murderer. It’s just the wind. Go back to sleep.”
Of the four possibilities, Parmenides explicitly entertains only two: the definite and determinate, and the indefinite and indeterminate. The former, the way of estin, is held out as the way to knowledge by the Goddess. The way of ‘is’ is knowable and thus, determinate to the fullest degree: it can be specified inasmuch as it is studded with “sign-posts” evincing its nature as “ungenerable, unperishing, a whole of a single kind, unmoving and perfect” (8.3–4).7 Being is also characterized in terms of what is ontologically most distinct and definite: the Goddess asserts the eternal, immutable nature of Being in light of the fact that it cannot come-to-be out of anything else; its perfection is embodied in the sphere, which is fully self-contained. The latter way, by contrast, is proscribed; it is not a “true way” to knowledge precisely because of its utter indeterminacy and lack of existence. The eighth fragment poses the decision between the two routes in terms of a strong disjunction, “it is or it is not” (8.16), but the Goddess adds that “it is judged—as it necessarily must—that the latter option remain unthinkable and without name (for it is not a true path), while the former one remains and is true” (8.16–18). Hence, the injunction of the Goddess in the sixth fragment is barring the poet—and through him, all mortals—from pursuing the route of nothing: nothing does not exist and cannot be thought, nor will it ever be the case that the things which are not will be (6.1). Therefore, no inquiry into them should be attempted. On the other hand, it is appropriate for us to say and to think of what-is, because it can exist and can be the object of thought and inquiry.
On this reading, the purpose of Parmenides’s rejection of not-being, understood in terms of indeterminacy and indefiniteness, is to defend the possibility of human knowledge and philosophical inquiry. This point becomes clearer if viewed in light of Parmenides’s dialogue with Xenophanes. An older contemporary of Parmenides, Xenophanes denied the possibility of human knowledge of the divine, contending that we could, at best, have belief (fr. 34, 35).8 Parmenides is staking out a claim for the possibility of human knowledge and this claim rests on shutting down anything that infringes upon and dilutes this possibility. Hence, the way of is-not must be rejected by Parmenides: lacking all limits and boundaries, the indeterminate nature of ‘what is not’, along with its indefinite existence, eludes our epistemic grasp. Not-being “is not a true way,” since it essentially negates the existence and knowability of things, obviating the possibility of knowledge.
By extension, however, the way of mortal opinion must also be rejected— by falling short on the scale of either determinacy or definiteness, the way of belief admits that its objects may not even fully exist or may be recalcitrant to thought. Qualified not-being is based on the assumption that determinacy and definiteness operate on a continuum, such that there are degrees of being and, hence, degrees of knowing. Given this assumption, it becomes increasingly difficult to say at what point something “exists” or is “known.” Parmenides’s rejection of the “blind alley” of mortal opinion is designed, then, to rout the kinds of challenges that arise from considerations of vagueness, both from a semantic perspective and from an ontological perspective. He thus inverts Xenophanes’s claim that knowledge of things is impossible and human beings can only hope for belief regarding divine things. Belief, for Parmenides, is a manifestation of the confusion that arises in mortals when they try to pursue both what is and what is not—when they direct their attention to those things whose very being is indefinite and that only admit of incomplete and indeterminate awareness. Knowledge, on the other hand, is possible of determinate and definite reality, “what-is,” the only subject of which knowledge is possible.
If we are to understand Parmenides as trying to lay claim to the possibility of human knowledge by excluding the boundless indeterminacy and indefiniteness which not-being at any level involves, it is, perhaps, ironic that his legacy should fall partly into the hands of the Megarians, whose paradoxes based on indefiniteness and indeterminacy of language and conceptual thought challenged dogmatic attempts to solve philosophical problems. Euclid of Megara (430–360 BCE), a disciple of Socrates, is described as deeply influenced by Parmenides and became the founder of the Megarian school. Though none of his writings are extant, his successor Eubulides of Miletus is credited with the invention of logical puzzles like the sorites paradox, which problematizes dogmatic attempts at answering philosophical questions by appeal to semantic and ontological vagueness.
Calling upon the indeterminacy of a conceptual category, such as ‘heap’, and the indefinite and ambiguous nature surrounding such a fact in the world, the Megarians appeal, at some level, to the Parmenidean analysis of not-being understood as indeterminacy and indefiniteness, casting doubt on the possibility of a stable reality that forms the object of cognition. While this may be overstating the case—since Euclid and Eubulides seem to be interested in raising problems for those who would presume to defend some philosophical view rather than systematically undermining the intelligibility of reality proper—the material point remains that the arsenal they employ in their assault is Parmenidean in nature.
If we are correct in identifying the dual continua of definiteness and determinacy as specifying two levels of reality and being, we can better understand the claim that only ‘what-is’ can be spoken of, thought, or known as a claim about the nature of the object of speech or knowledge. A definite and determinate thing can be the proper object of what is called knowledge. Anything falling short of that, either in terms of definiteness or determinacy, might be taken up as an object of reflection or speech, but could never be adequately captured by either, since it would fail to be adequately “real.” The two continua allow us to specify in what way exactly the object in question falls short. The inheritors of the Parmenidean legacy seem to have adopted and adapted these continua in their own struggles against philosophical dogmatism. The Megarians, in the puzzles that have come down to us, clearly draw on the concepts of indeterminacy and indefiniteness to question the philosophical intuitions of their contemporaries. It is this continued application of the Parmenidean insight into not-being that lays the gauntlet for all subsequent Greek thinkers. For philosophical thought to be possible, these thinkers must all struggle with and find some way of responding to the challenge of Parmenides’s two ways.
Post-Parmenidean Greek thinkers like Plato and Aristotle contend with the consequences of Parmenides’s two ways by attempting to mitigate and qualify Parmenidean not-being, suppressing the understanding of not-being as limitless indeterminacy. They interpret not-being, instead, in terms of not-being-a-something in order to recover the possibility of philosophical knowledge. By way of contrast, I will show that both ineffability and indeterminacy as the condition of possibility for complete human emancipation are arguably embraced in several textual traditions of Indian and Chinese Buddhist philosophy. In this section, I will first outline the Platonic response to Parmenidean not-being. I will then compare this view to the understanding of emptiness and not-being as ineffable and nonconceptual in Indian and Chinese Madhyamaka philosophy, as treated by Priest and Ho (Chapters 7 and 8 in this volume), respectively. I argue that while both Plato and the Asian thinkers considered herein concur that conceptual, philosophical knowledge depends on some determinate, definite understanding of not-being, they implicitly embrace some further notion of not-being that lies beyond the purview of concepts and thought. The dual continua identified in Parmenides’s poems can further help us to better understand the nature of this implicit not-being in both cases.
First, let us look at Plato’s response to the Parmenidean challenge. Plato illustrates the confusion that attends the discussion of not-being in his dialogue, Sophist. The interlocutors—the visitor and Theaetetus—are plagued by perplexity in their initial attempts to sort out “what-is-not”, which is said to be unutterable, unthinkable, unformulable, and resistant to predications of quantity or quality. Yet, in virtue of speaking of “not-being” they cannot help but attach being to it in speech by characterizing it in terms of its qualities or quantities, thereby resulting in contradictions (239a1-b3). The nature of perplexity, here, stems not from the incurable vagueness of not-being inasmuch as it is recalcitrant to any attempt to characterize it, but from the contradiction to which it gives rise given the kind of thing it is—not-being, that is, not the kind of thing of which any attribute can be predicated. In other words, the perplexity and confusion surrounding not-being are no different from the difficulties that attend talking about nothing. The point to note is that in the interlocutors’ quick dismissal of not-being based on our inability to talk about it or conceive of it without falsifying it, the nature of not-being is circumscribed in light of our understanding of being and beings that admit of predication, quantification, and qualification rather than in light of any sense of not-being as something indeterminate, without limit, or indefinite.
Plato goes on to identify the principal difficulty he sees with the Parmenidean conception of being and not-being: there is no conception of what is different from being without its lapsing into not-being (Sophist 244d2–8). In other words, Plato thinks that Parmenides never explores the distinction between not-being as different from a something or different from what exists and not-being taken absolutely. He tries to show how Parmenides’s view leads to absurdities on both the semantic and ontological levels (244c–e). He further points out how Parmenides’s views negate generation and corruption.
To mitigate these absurdities, Plato elaborates on the nature of the “different” as a relational term, through which whatever is different “has to be what it is from something that’s different” (Sophist 255c), hence stands in relation to that something. All other things which participate in the different are different from that which is, hence the description “different” makes each of them not be; yet, they are all still beings, so they also share in that which is (256e5–257b2, 258b2–3). On the other hand, that which is not is different from those beings, hence it is “itself,” pure negation and not-being; but it is also part of those things as limited not-being (257a4–6). From this, Plato (via the visitor) concludes that denial does not signify a contrary; rather, negations such as ‘not’ and alpha privatives such as “non-” point us to something other than the things signified by the words following these negatives (257c). In the case of that which is, what is different from it is precisely that which is not (25b7–8), which must exist, since it is so related to that which is. Hence, according to the visitor, their discussions have not only contravened Parmenides by showing that that which is not is, but also have manifested the form and true nature of that which is not:
Since we showed that the nature of the different is, chopped up among all beings in relation to each other, we dared to say that that which is not really is just this, namely, each part of the nature of the different that’s set over against that which is. (258d4–e3)
Here, Plato effectively makes a corrective sweep at Parmenidean not-being: it cannot be the indeterminate limitlessness whose very nature makes contemplation of it impossible. Rather, not-being is “not-being-a-particular-something” in virtue of being different from it; like the flip side of a coin, not-being is simply the “reverse side” of that which is. Since that which is also shares in the different, it is different from many other things, each of which not only is in many ways, but also is not in many ways too (259b1–5). Hence, not-being is “scattered over all those which are” (260b6).
The converse of the Platonic view is evident in Madhyamika philosophy, in its Chinese interpretation, as a point of comparison. As Chien-hsing Ho explains in Chapter 8 of this volume, it is precisely the indeterminate nature of the myriad beings that constitutes their emptiness of substantial existence. While reality may be divisible into ontic and ontological levels— the former constituted by the myriad of empty beings, the latter, absolute emptiness, supreme void, the way, and nirvāṇa—the two levels are actually fused, given the impossibility of locating determinate beings even on the ontic level. The radical momentariness of beings contributes to the inability to confer determinate form or definite boundaries on beings. According to Ho, Sengzhao’s understanding of emptiness can be characterized in terms of ontic indeterminacy. That is, things are empty of substantial existence (that is Being) even on the ontic level of the myriad phenomena because they are devoid of determinate form and cannot be delimited or determined to be such. The myriad things, in other words, do not correspond in a definite way to the linguistic designations that refer to them. It is this referentially indeterminate reality that we clumsily carve up by concepts to suit our conventional purposes and needs.
Under Ho’s explanation, Sengzhao’s ultimate or ontological level comes closest to Parmenidean not-Being. Being indefinitely indeterminate, in contrast to the definite indeterminacy of the ontic level of the myriad of empty things, supreme void or absolute emptiness is pre-conceptual and inexpressible. The ineffability and uncognizability of this emptiness resonates with the Parmenidean point that the way of not-Being is unthinkable, unknowable and inexpressible. While Parmenides eschews this in order to make philosophical reflection possible and to rescue the human intellect from perplexity, the Madhyamika Buddhists advocate the soteriological potential of this reality. Comparing supreme void with ultimate truth, Ho articulates this claim:
Ultimate truth is ineffable; it is not a propositional fact that one can grasp conceptually and formulate in words. In addition, one cannot attain enlightenment by grasping the fact. And yet, for Sengzhao, as for Mahayana Buddhists in general, the direct realization of ultimate truth would effectively lead to the attainment of enlightenment. (Chapter 8, this volume, 111)
One can ask, here, what this “direct realization” would look like. It cannot be conceptual, linguistic, discursive, rational, or, as Ho goes onto explain, even pragmatic. Citing the Zhaolun sūtra, which Sengzhao discusses approvingly, Ho suggests that nirvāṇa, the attainment of enlightenment by the direct realization of the ultimate truth that is supreme emptiness (kong), would be one of conceptual quiescence. Additionally, Ho points to the erasure of the distinction between subject and object that must also necessarily occur in the experience of ultimate reality, that is, supreme void.
The discussion of the ontological level of supreme void and the characterization of it in terms of nirvāṇa and conceptual quiescence raise a familiar paradox: if ultimate truth is pre-conceptual and without subject-object distinction, how can we say anything about it at all? Does not any discussion of the nature of ultimate not-being necessarily misrepresent it purely in virtue of expressing it? Graham Priest’s essay “Speaking of the Ineffable …” (Chapter 7 of this volume) presents us with a provocative response to this challenge. Confronting head on the contradiction involved in speaking about the ineffable, Priest marshals the conceptual resources of the Buddhist tradition, specifically the catuṣkoti, and contemporary paraconsistent logic in order to rigorously defend how one can express the ineffable. Priest begins with a historical look at the development of the concept of nothingness in Buddhism, which we see as culminating with the view of Nāgārjuna, who makes a corrective sweep at the Abhidharma tradition and distils the preceding Mahayāna sūtra tradition in his Mūlamadhyamakakārika (MMK). Everything is empty of self-existence and has being in virtue of its relation to other things, viz., causes and effects, its parts, concepts, and language. Nāgārjuna also embraces and reinterprets the doctrine of two truths, where emptiness is the nature of the world as it is ultimately, devoid of conceptual interpretation, while conventional reality is the converse side of it, replete with linguistic and conceptual proliferation. As such, one cannot express the ultimate nature of reality (MMK XXII.11–12). Priest clarifies that one can have knowledge of it by acquaintance, but not via description. Despite this admission, Buddhist philosophers, like their Western counterparts, as Priest points out by way of comparison, appear committed to speaking of the ineffable.
One way to interpret this contradiction is to defuse it by making a distinction. This seems to be the strategy of Gorampa, who distinguishes, Priest tells us, between a nominal and an ultimate ultimate. Any statement about the ultimate, then, applies to the nominal ultimate, while the ultimate ultimate is, by definition, ineffable. Priest critiques this strategy, however, by saying that this would make Gorampa’s own talk of the ultimate ultimate about the nominal ultimate, so the contradiction stands.
Priest, instead, advocates the use of the catuṣkoti, articulated and formalized through the techniques of paraconsistent and plurivalent logic, to endorse rather than defuse the contradiction. Paraconsistent logic echoes the third limb of the catuṣkoti, which is a true contradiction. Plurivalent logic sets up a system wherein we can designate a state of affairs, e, as ineffable, illustrating that “[t]he fact that one can say something about nothing does not undercut the fact that one cannot” (Chapter 7, this volume, 100). Priest shows how contraposing the denotation relation specifies that variable n has no name, not even ‘n’. While this technique formalizes the claim that ineffability is describable, it is the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, to which Priest draws our attention, which suggests yet another approach to the problem. The Goddess’s admonishment to Śāriputra provides an interesting counterimage to the Goddess of Parmenides’s poem, which the ineffable can and must be expressed because words are not anything distinct from nothing, but are empty as well and manifest its nature. The concluding “expression” of nonduality by Vimalakīrti points to the fact that the ineffability of nonduality can be expressed precisely in relation to an expression of duality. Priest describes the technique: “Non-duality … requires that one talk about the ineffable; the techniques of paraconsistent logic show how to make precise sense of this idea” (Chapter 7, this volume, 102). Though Parmenides would certainly take issue with the concept of emptiness and relational being, as would Plato, we can use the dual schema of determinacy and definiteness to help us understand the conceptual move that Priest identifies in the Vimalakīrti Sūtra. Adopt definiteness and determinacy as axes x and y. Of the four quadrants created, the upper right quadrant would plot definite and determinate things, the upper left all determinate but indefinite things, lower right all definite but indeterminate things, and lower left the indeterminate and indefinite. Given the nature of the indefinite and indeterminate, we can assume that the lower left quadrant remains unpopulated. We can identify, however, what belongs there precisely in virtue of the fact that the remaining three quadrants are populated. In other words, expressing nothing requires that we attempt to give expression to it—what we end up expressing, perhaps best captured by Gorampa’s nominal ultimate, serves as a sign pointing beyond itself to some ultimate ultimate. To appreciate Vimalakīrti’s expression of nonduality, in other words, we require Mañjuśri’s characterization of it.
There is an original sense of not-being in Parmenides, understandable in terms of a set of logical alternatives that are inherent in his characterization of the ways of inquiry. Of these alternatives, the sense of not-being as indeterminacy and indefiniteness that informs them is seized upon by Megarian followers of Parmenides who adopt his fundamental conceptual categories, but without the attendant commitment to defending the possibility of human knowledge.
The sense of not-being which is inherent to Parmenides’s account is covered over, to some extent, by other interpreters. Plato is more interested in reversing some of the absurd conclusions to which Parmenides’s analysis lends itself. On the other hand, by comparison with Madhyamaka treatments of emptiness and ineffability in the Indian Buddhist and Chinese Buddhist traditions, we can begin to see a dialogue emerge about the nature and limits of not-Being, whether understood in terms of Parmenidean indeterminacy and indefiniteness or in terms of the Buddhist notion of emptiness. The other values on the four-value scale of interpreting Parmenides, definite determinacy, determinate indefiniteness, and definite indeterminacy, may also prove to be an effective tool in parsing the different senses and levels of emptiness that thinkers such as Sengzhao and Nāgārjuna and his commentators employ. The direct realization of emptiness is taken to be without concepts and inexpressible in some sense, though this remains a matter of interpretation, as Priest suggests. The philosophical discussion of emptiness and the articulation of the path to its direct realization, however, requires concepts and language, which might lead us to distinguish, as Ho articulates in Sengzhao’s philosophy, two levels through which to understand the emptiness or not-Being of things: an ontic level that endorses distinctions and an ontological one that erases them. Despite their distinctly different starting points, Plato, Sengzhao, and Nāgārjuna adopt a strikingly similar attitude toward not-being, though for vastly different reasons. Regardless of these differences, on some fundamental level, these thinkers seem to concur that recovering the possibility of philosophical knowing depends on delimiting and defining not-being in terms of some particular nothing. We may not be able to know everything, but to grasp anything we must know nothing in particular.
1 There is some disagreement in the critical literature as to how to translate this expression. Gallop (1984) reads it as a “much-speaking route” (49), but this seems nonsensical. While Scott Austin (1986) renders it as “a significant road” (156). In conversation with S. Menn, it was pointed out to me that “much famed road” seems like the simplest meaning; in addition, poluphemon, recalling the Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey, highlights Parmenides’s use of epic vocabulary and imagery in his poem.
2 I employ {} to indicate that the ‘it’ supplied by me in the translation of this passage is a matter of some contention in the critical literature—there may be no subject of the esti, or it may have to be supplied, as discussed further later on.
3 Sider (1986) notes that the mē has a “generalizing force,” hence ‘what-is-not’ or ‘not-being’ (12).
4 I do not mean to suggest here that Owen (1982) propounds this view; rather, remarks of his against a cosmological understanding of the poem are taken up by Gallop (1984) in his defense of the existential reading of the verb. I point to Owen’s remarks, here, in order to reconstruct the case as lucidly as possible.
5 The argument for a fused esti is advocated and defended expertly by Furley (1989) and Furth (1968, 123ff.).
6 I am indebted to examples presented in Mourelatos (1979, 319–329). Mourelatos introduces these examples to support a distinction he draws between uses of ‘nothing’ and ‘nobody’: the existential use, which I interpret as the indefinite but determinate, and the characterizing use, which I conceive of as the definite but indeterminate.
7 Many commentators note the prevalence of negative language in the Goddess’s own speech as a remarkable feature of the poem. See Austin (1986), who contends with this problem.
8 Fragment 34: “No man knows, or ever will know, the truth about the gods and about everything I speak of: for even if one chanced to say the complete truth, yet oneself knows it not; but seeming is wrought over all things [or fancy is wrought in the case of all men]” (Sextus Adversus Mathematicos VII, 49). Fragment 35: “Let these things be opined as resembling the truth” (Sextus Adv. Math. VII, 110).