Being, non-Being, and Not Being
A fine line, yet a world of difference
If you’ve read the other articles about the world, black vs white mentality, and grey neutrality, you have probably seen the amateur diagrams used to explain some complex ideas. However I must admit that the diagram for this one is a lot harder to grasp conceptually. This is especially because regardless of the diagram, there can be so many ways to elaborate on the distinction between being, non-being, and not being. So before throwing out any diagrams, let me try to explain things linguistically.
A Mexican, a German, and a non-German walk into a bar…
The core of the issue here is: how many people are we talking about?
When you read that, you probably intuitively interpreted it as 3 people. However….
- It could be a Mexican, a German and e.g. an American (3 people)
- It could simply be a German and a non-German Mexican (2 people)
- Or what if the non-German is actually not even a person at all, and the person walking in is a Mexican-German? (1 person)
The core problem here is the distinction between being, not being, and non-being. Drawing a fundamental difference between not-being and non-being might seem trivial or picky, but it is a fine line that makes a world of difference, as the following section will prove.
