[MD] Parmenides the Taoist

[david buchanan]

Case, Matt and all MOQers:

dmb says:
This is will be the second reply to Case's question. Yesterday I added 
Kingsley to Gallagher's take on Parmenides and today I just re-discovered a 
footnote in Ken Wilber's "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality" (pages 656-7) that 
addresses the issue quite directly. First, here is the question again...

Case said:
I could easily be mistaken but wasn't Parmenides' claim that the world is 
still and unchanging and that change is an illusion. Wasn't his student 
Zeno's paradox supposed to prove that movement and change are impossible?

dmb quotes Wilber:

"The facts are rather straightforward; their interpretation is tricky.

..One day, around 460 B.C., the great philsopher Parmenides came to twn 
accompanied by his pupil Zeno. Parmenides impressed Socrates with the idea 
of Permanence. Reality, Parmenides argued, is Unchanging. Zeno supported his 
mentor's position by reducing to absurdity any assertion that motion and 
change really do exist.

That is the popular account of the story Plato give in the dialogue entitled 
Parmendies. Zeno's 'demonstrations' have usually been taken as an example  
of a certain type of philosophical argument (dialectical refutation), and I 
do not doubt that they were that. But if they are compared with, for 
example, similar dialedtial arguments put forth by the Buddhist genius 
Nagarjuna, it appears Zeno (and Parmenides) might have been attempting 
something else as well; namely, a direct pointing to reality freed of all 
differentiating conceptualizations.

...If we take his assertion that motion does not exist as being literally 
true, then Parmenides has to be seen as being rather confused. But if these 
statements were in fact part of the 'pointing out instructions' for 
recognizing primordial awareness (free of differentiating 
conceptualization), then they take on rather profound meaning.

...In numerous places it seems simply unmistakable. Parmenides thoroughly 
and continuously denies any description of the world that presupposes that 
difference is real: he is directly point to the One, which can be found in 
one's own direct awareness prior to differentiation.

...If this is so, ten to Parmenides goes the honor of bing the first 
infulential Westerner (as fat as I can tell) to penetrate to the causal One, 
however briefly (although perhaps this might also be traced to Parmenides 
own teacher, whom tradition names as the Pythagorean Ameinias).

...Moreover, the scholar T. Murti, whose "Central philosophy of Buddhism" is 
generally regarded as the finest treatment of Nagarjuna in English, points 
to Plato's Parmenides as the first real dialectic in the West that is 
similar to Nagarjuna's. Whether Plato fictionalized the meeting or not , 
that he chose Parmenides to present the dialectic shows that the meeting - 
if not 'historical' then certainly 'philosophical' - had profound meaning 
for him. And it makes all the more credible Plato's assertions that what he 
was really up to could not be put into written words, but had to be pointed 
out directly, from teacher to pupil, buy a sudden illumination."

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