Lets answer the last question of Aristotle, on his dying bed if we could.
I think, a being must be something that exist and non-being must not be.
but also a non-being can exist, is not words are not beings? and a being that exist will no longer exist?
Unless I do not know what is the conception of being and non-being.
IF not what is being and what is non-being?
The difference between knowing and not-knowing perhaps? It sounds to me like he was questioning the uncertainty about what lay ahead … if, in fact the life he had known, is all there is to know. In other words is death the end of it all?
Could you please tell about Aristotle’s death and his last question. I’m very interested to know.
I believe it is in reference to the title of the thread … as near as I can tell.
If you study philosophy as the studies of life, and not studies of theories and concepts, you will know that the beauty lies in life and not knowledge.
well at least my way of temporary thinking now.
But if you know, it would lies with the history of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates and all of the pre-socratic philosophers, at least the most famous ones.
I am not certain about the death of Aristotle or Plato, but as I heard and remember them about books and school teachers.
Plato and Aristotle both created Academies, the center of learning or the center of Athens. Plato died in old age, and the best student who carried the torch was Aristotle, and he build his new academy, and died in old age, I think. In his last final moments, he asked, what is being and non-being? Questioning about what he think he knows and the things he refuted against those pre-socratics and plato, what they believe. ( the non-practical and unscientific stuffs, like god and heaven, Aristotle perhaps believed life is an accident)
A non-being in his context is simply pure potential. A non-being has complete potential to exist. For example: Words. All words have complete potential to exist. Once we say them, they exist.
I really do think so, for us at least. Some good news, though. Our complete potential to exist is eternal.
I sincerely hope not.
Life is not an accident. Life is pure creation.
What in the world are you talking about Murdoc,
What is pure potential, pure creation and potential to exist is eternal?
So, what’s the point to exist, and know that one exists … and then not? Indeed, this is the eternal question.
Why? Because there is no answer?
I think this idea of non-being confuses more then it helps. I don’t see the highest level of being and non-being as the same. Take the production of color as an analogy. The primary colors of red blue and yellow are slower vibratory frequncies of white light which would be analogous to higher being,
Would it be right to say that the primary colors come from non-color or the vibrational frequency that is beyond our perception of the primary colors in which they are included?
The universe comes into existence as fractions of itself, slower but corresponding vibrational rates, from the devolving expressions of highest level of being which is the opposite of non-being.
Where the highest level of being is complete unity or “no-thing,” the absence of being is “nothing.” These are the opposite poles of the great scale of being.
the point of our existence is to show that the Universe is more than just atoms. it can create life. death as with life is the ability of the Universe to transform, matter to energy.
Pure potential is the inherent capacity for coming into being. In a sea of nothingness anything is possible. You just have to create it using energy.
So when something is dead it is a possibility to come back into being. As Aristotle has said:
It really isn’t that hard of a concept to grasp.
Alive = exist
Dead = a possibility to exist.
… and also as Nick has pointed out there are degrees of existence.
With this said, nothing is eternal.
If nothing is the pure potential for anything, then the pure potential for anything is eternal. Basic logic.
As for life being pure creation, this is something you must find out for yourself.
Hint: You would be surprised how much a fractal can teach you.
fractals are NOT nothing. they are based on the physical; expansion.
The last post of North makes more sense then Murdoc.
However I do not understand your analogy with colors. Perhaps , I need to study quantum physics and learn that energy are made of strings and vibrations?
I would say that the concept of reincarnation and samara can be put here, yet, as Heraclitus puts it, the cosmos is made of fire, everything came from fire and will go back there and be change into something else. While, the science will say you simply just become back to dust. And then the dust to somewhere else, the life cycle starts over again.
I would to add the Democritus phrase, " It is unknown that all the stones and sand is always gathered and collected back in the same place"
( geology - the particles are eroded away , simple through the wind)
What is this energy? Chi kung?
Pure potential is the inherent capacity for coming into being. In a sea of no-thingness anything is possible. You just have to create it using energy.
With this said, no-thing is eternal.
This is a good point. Although, when broken down space, matter, and energy never stay the same. They are constantly changing. Are they not? So each individual matter is not eternal because it dies and changes to something else. What is matter, by the way? As for space, is there such a thing?
You misunderstood me here. I never said fractals are nothing. In fact, I meant the complete opposite, infinite creationism.
I don’t know what Chi Kung is. I am thinking on the lines of white light. But, what is white light? Isn’t it the spectrum of colors except for black?
You could say that energy is everything. Energy is a beam of infinite creationism. A swirling spiral fractal consisting of every color possible flowing along constantly evolving, changing, and randomly creating new ‘fractals’. I don’t know. I am just throwing things out there at this point.
Why are you so hasty in your reply? We have the rest of eternity to figure it out? 
Does being and non-being not always exist in parallel?
Is it possible for them not to exist in parallel?
If you do not know what is chi kung, then you will just give me a logical simple, scientific idea how you would define energy. You may have a picture of buddhalike avatar but you do not have his mind.
you may have eternity time of figuring it out, but my eternity is for sleeping.
" Give me eternity of push ups", bill and ted movie
Why are you asking a question, can’t you not answer the question.
There isn’t really such a thing as “non-being,” except perhaps for a reference to a first person consciousness of "thinking’ in the Sartrean tradition. I like this way specifically because it is a direct realist dualism as opposed to true idealism. It might be considered a kind of epiphenomenalism.
The actual activity of thinking is nothing because it is always about something else. "Thoughts,’ however, are modeled by language and therefore words, which are the entities “in” the thoughts, and the things which can serve as this “something else” that consciousness is engaged with. So the concept, which it is, is an actual object, that is, the word “non-being” is a thing and is directly real while the idea of it isn’t possible when there is reflection because one cannot know non-being.
A word, even if it is a description for the mental concept of absence, has being, can be sensed, and is what consciousness has as its focus when thinking about the word. Also language is sound and is reducible to wave activity which is in turn reducible to physical instances that are universal for all objects, only other objects are too dense to vibrate at such a frequence as to exist as a soundwave. All words are real physical, or should I say sensible for the sensitive rationalists, things which cannot possibly have non-being. Therefore ““non-being”” as an idea is impossible and paradoxical as a word-- to say “this word means nothing” is nonsense.
Do it like Frenchy. The correct way to classify “non-being” is as a negation, or the mental consciousness-of an idea and the affirmation of this activity by thinking. I cannot describe it as thinking because “thinking” isn’t anything. Rather, the contents of thought, such as the words and higher level contextualizations (definitions) are the objects that provide the possibility for the negation, just as the objects that are not experienced are described as having non-being. But these objects are not particulars…they are not individual phenomena, they are classified as being-in-general, so to say that an object which is not experienced does not exist is a mistake. Instead it is by the presence and absence that beings are revealed to thought and consciousness…but nothing is ever truely “not there.”
As I mentioned above, the possiblity to “not experience an object” implies that that object exists to “not be experienced.” Being in general is the necessary feature of any possible particular “thing” and is therefore not contingent to a perspective that is either “there or not.”
Because thinking is captured by language, everything thought is subject to the discrepencies of language gaming, but the fundamental necessary structures of this “event” require that there be certain rules in place for the distingushing of truth values of contingent statements about the being in general. This is how we are captured.