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Magnificent Desolation by Dana Wilde Before I say what happened to the Moon, let me tell you what Parmenides said about reality. He was born in the Greek city Elea, in southern Italy, in the last decades of the 500s BC. Socrates when very young talked with the elderly Parmenides, and speaks of him in Plato's Theaetetus as a "being whom I respect above all ... a 'reverend and awful' figure." Socrates expresses the fear that no one understands exactly what Parmenides was talking about. Parmenides' words have tumbled down the ages to us in a collection of fragments, most of which sound more like Orphic sayings rather than part of a coherent rational philosophy. But one of the main threads in the longer fragments is fairly simple and, to a literal-minded reader, self-evident. Parmenides says that what is, must be, and that what is not, cannot be. What difficulty Socrates might have had with remarks like these is not immediately clear. If you are grasping them, these sentences sound exactly the same, logically, as sentences like "blue must be blue" and "colors other than blue cannot be blue." They are of course a little more complicated. Parmenides suggests straight up that the two sentences actually refer to two ways of understanding the world. One way assumes that everything that is exists and any understanding of truth and reality comes through this assumption. The other way assumes that what is not is knowable despite its non-existence, and that an understanding of truth and reality can come through understanding what is not. Parmenides flatly says that "no information comes back" from this latter way. "You cannot know nonexistence." This also seems obvious enough. But as Socrates well knew, it is not really obvious. The truth of Parmenides' statements hinges completely on what you take to be real. If you take the material world to be real, then any object of your five senses is part of what is, and you can assume that accurate information about reality comes through them. This, in general, is the view of science as it has constructed itself in the last 400 years. Knowledge is derived from repeatable observations of and experiments with the materials of the universe. Anything that is not experimentally or observationally verifiable is not real and is not inquired into or even spoken of. For example, most scientists ignore reports of UFOs, because there is no repeatable, verifiable evidence that UFOs - as opposed to airplanes, meteors or swamp gases - even exist. Or more interestingly, some cognitive psychologists avoid discussions of "consciousness," as though it does not exist. But despite the instructions of science, it is not necessary to take the material world as the final reality of the cosmos. This view is most clearly represented, perhaps, in the Hindu view that the material universe is an illusion, or a shadow of reality, called maya. The material existence, or actual physical nature, that we perceive is called prakriti. The illusion itself is made |
of tensions between three qualities of existence called the gunas - roughly speaking, the qualities of inertia, restlessness and balance. Material reality is not as we perceive it; it is made of qualities rather than material substance. This diverges a little from Parmenides, but is nonetheless similar to what he says. For Parmenides also introduces, in his fragments, the difference between being and becoming. In other words, what is timelessly and always is whatever it is; it has being. The material world, on the other hand, is in a constant state of flux, it always changes and becomes something else. Because it is always becoming something else, it is never anything. It never is, but always becomes. The becoming is an appearance only, like a shadow, which is an absence of light - nothing appearing over something. The appearance is an illusion; it is not. And so to Parmenides and Hindus, the material world is not, finally, what is. Its existence is not the existence we perceive, and so to believe that what we perceive is what is is an error. Plato later developed this by saying that a material object is an image of reality, and is not the being, or what is, of the reality itself. No information about reality comes back from what is not. The material world we perceive is not real; it is an illusion of change, flux, transience. Now in the words of Plutarch, Parmenides was "an ancient naturalist," and we should not understand that he denied our experience of the material world. But if matter is only an image of what is, then what does Parmenides say is real? An answer is in one of his cryptic fragments: "to think and to be are one and the same." If you are at all familiar with Plato, you can see from this that Socrates took Parmenides very seriously. This one sentence encapsulates a key element of everything Socrates says about reality: the noetic world - of thought and ideas - is what is, and the rest is an illusion, like the play of puppet shadows on the wall of a firelit cave. |