In which Humpty Dumpty, a true Heraclitean, asserts that there must exist an opposite to a birthday which is an un-birthday.
Humpty Dumpty informs Alice that 'there are three hundred and sixty four days when you might get un-birthday presents'. It is obvious to him that un-birthdays are real Beings and not mere utterances. His statement is another augmentation to one of the oldest and rudimentary philosophical controversies: whether Non-Being, like Being, exists.
Footprints of this controversy, which was initially conceived by Greek philosophy, can be tracked all over the two books of Alice. Carroll conveys, through Alice's discourses with the various figures she meets on her way, his belief that Non-Being does indeed exist. This stand can be inferred not just from Humpty Dumpty's statement but from other passages in Alice as well.
The beginning of the 6th Century B.C. was a defining moment in the history of mankind intellectual thought. From this time on, for a period that lasted around 150 years, some Greeks, in later years called the 'pre-Socratics', began to ask new questions and propound new answers about the nature of the universe. (Most of the pre-Socratics flourished not in Athens, nor even on mainland Greece, but in Asia Minor, Lower Italy and Sicily. 'Greek', in this context, is a cultural expression rather than a geographical one.)
The pre-Socratics were the first to formulate tenets that were based on reasonable arguments rather than on theological doctrines, and they set the foundation on which the future intellectual revolution in philosophy would be created by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
But before we follow Alice into Wonderland, we should recall the roots of the controversy, in Elea in Lower Italy, in the early 5th Century BC. There, Parmenides, asserted in a poem that he had composed, that only the 'Is' is, whilst to speak of the 'Is not' is to take a '. . . wholly incredible course, since you cannot recognise Not Being (for this is impossible), nor could you speak of it, for thought and Being are the same thing.'
