Parmenides of Elea (5th–6th century BC) was clearly brilliant because he discussed his philosophical views on the world in the form of a poem! In the poem, entitled On Nature, Parmenides encounters a goddess who distinguishes between a ‘way of truth’ and a ‘way of appearances’. On the way of truth, we ignore our perceptions and think about the world purely rationally: this is the only way for us to understand how the world really is. We also come to see the world as being fundamentally different in kind from how we experience it to be, which is how we see it on the way of appearances.
We experience the world as being varied in many ways. It appears to have a multiplicity of objects within it, these objects seem to undergo change, and subsequently, numerous events occur: things come into and go out of existence, get created and destroyed, move about from place to place, and so on and so forth. However, once we embark on the way of truth, we come to see that this is all illusory. Some ways of describing the world involve talking in a negative way, that is, involve saying how things aren’t. We might say a certain thing doesn’t exist, isn’t in some location, or hasn’t got a certain feature. However, ‘what is not’ does not exist: there are no non-existent things, and individuals don’t possess non-existent features. Since our world doesn’t contain the non-existent entities and states we seemingly refer to with such talk, it’s nonsense to say anything about what isn’t the case. On the way of truth, we are thus only permitted to describe the world in positive terms: we can only say how things are. However, once we do this, reality turns out to be one single whole, undifferentiated, eternal, and unchanging entity. We can’t say that the world came to be, or that it will ever cease to be, because that would involve there having been a nothing beforehand, or there being a nothing after, and nothing could not exist. Nor can we say that reality contains any change. For if something changes, it must have not been a certain way before. Nor can we say that reality is at all differentiated. If it was, then it would be a certain way in one place, and not a certain way in another. Nor can we say that reality contains a past or a future, for that would involve there being moments that are not the present time. Reality must also be perfectly spherical, because there cannot be more of it one direction than another, and it cannot contain any multiplicity of things, because the emptiness that would differentiate one object from another can’t exist. | |||