What is not, is not: nothing comes from nothing

Parmenides' poem; the Way of Truth; "being is, not-being is not"

Parménide c. 515 BC · c. 450 BCWhat is, is; what is not can neither be thought nor said: being has neither birth nor end.

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What it claims

Being cannot be born from not-being: it has neither beginning nor end, and "nothing" is not a possibility that would need explaining.

Why

What is not can be neither thought nor said: so nothing is not a possibility that needs explaining.

The same idea through history

Parménide480 BCIn his poem a goddess teaches Parmenides that there are only two ways of inquiry: "it is" and "it is not". Only the first can be followed, because what is not can be neither thought nor said.

Lucrèce55 BCLucretius takes up the principle in a physical form: nothing is born from nothing, and nothing returns to nothing (On the Nature of Things, book I). He draws an atomic physics from it, not a logic of being.

Henri Bergson1907Bergson defends a neighbouring thesis by another route: the idea of an absolute nothing is a pseudo-idea that vanishes when examined.

In short

"What is not, is not: nothing comes from nothing" is an argument by Parménide (On Nature, fragments B2, B6, B8 (c. 480 BC), 480 BC) on the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" (answer: nothingness does not exist). Its claim: Being cannot be born from not-being: it has neither beginning nor end, and "nothing" is not a possibility that would need explaining. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3, P4). AskPhilosophy presents 2 objections, 0 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

On Nature, fragments B2, B6, B8 (c. 480 BC)

Valid with an implicit premise

People often ask: why is there something rather than nothing? That assumes that "nothing" is a possibility, a state in which the universe could have stayed. Nearly 2,500 years ago Parmenides of Elea answered that this is already a mistake: "what is not" can be neither thought nor said. If nothing is not a possibility, then being cannot have come out of it, and the question falls. The reasoning reaches us through fragments of his poem, quoted by later authors; the French translation we quote is Tannery's (1887).

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3 and P4, one can accept that not-being is unthinkable and still say that the world began 14 billion years ago from a physical state very different from ours. Nothing in P1 and P2 excludes a relative beginning: it is P4 that treats every beginning as an emergence out of absolute nothing.

The argument is valid with the hidden premises P3 and P4. P2 says that not-being is unthinkable; P3 concludes that the "it is not" way cannot be followed; P4 says that "being came out of nothing" would be exactly a case of that way. The debates concern mostly P2 (the words "is not" have several senses, see Plato) and P4 (Parmenides' text says that being cannot have begun, but his aim is to reject all coming-to-be, not to answer a modern question about nothing).

Analogy. Imagine being asked: "Why are there numbers rather than no numbers?" For the question to make sense, you would have to describe a world without numbers, but describing (counting things, comparing them) already uses numbers. Parmenides says the same of being: to describe nothing, you would already have to be something.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Plato 360 BC · attacks premise 2

In the Sophist, the Stranger from Elea quotes Parmenides' prohibition ("not-being never is") and says that we have gone further than he did: we have shown that not-being is, but as "other" and not as the opposite of being. To say that a thing "is not" such and such (is not great, is not beautiful) is to say that it is other than that, and this "other" exists. So one can speak of not-being without contradiction. Plato declines to rule on a possible opposite of being ("we have long said good-bye to that inquiry").

no reply

No reply possible: objection raised in -360, after the author's death (-450).

The debate goes on (our summary) Parmenides had died long before. His defenders note that Plato changes the subject: his "not-being" is the "is not such and such" (a difference), not absolute nothing, which Plato himself sets aside. So Parmenides' argument against absolute nothing is not touched; it is only made more precise.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Almost everyone now accepts that Plato distinguishes two senses of "not being". The disagreement stays open: is absolute nothing really unthinkable, or only hard to speak about?

Gorgias 440 BC · attacks the conclusion

In a treatise On Not-Being, or On Nature, known to us only through summaries (in Sextus Empiricus and in a work attributed to Aristotle), Gorgias uses the Eleatics' own tools against them. He claims that nothing exists; that even if something existed it could not be known; and that if it were known it could not be told to others. If Parmenides' principles are enough to forbid nothing, pushed further they can forbid being as well.

no reply

Parménide did reply, but that text is not yet in our corpus.

The debate goes on (our summary) Scholars still debate how serious Gorgias was: a sincere thesis, a parody of the Eleatics, or a rhetorical show? Our summary rests on second-hand texts and has not been checked against the original.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point: there is no direct answer from Parmenides (Gorgias came after him), and historians are divided over the exact meaning of the treatise.