[MD] Parmenides the Taoist

[Case]

dmb,

Your's or Wilber's observations illustrate a point I have been trying to
make for some time. The solid evidence we have for the existence of
Parmenides if fairly limited. A few fragments, quotes from other authors,
Plato... Not a lot really. Almost any conclusion one makes about the man is
subject to a huge margin of error.

This does not stop us from trying or from speculating; but nothing in our
speculations is very solid. My point has long been that the past carries
with it no more certainty than the future. It is all estimation. Statements
made within certain levels of probability.

Authors who engage in this kind of speculation generally fall into two
types: serious scholars playfully pushing the envelope of their chosen field
and radicals hell bent on bringing down the house and reveling in their bad
boy status. 

Among the first type I would place someone like James Charlesworth. In his
book "The Beloved Disciple" he speculates on the authorship of the Gospel of
John. He writes it a bit like a mystery covering various points about
traditional views, noting the speculations of others etc. He eventually gets
around to concluding that the real author was the Apostle Thomas. In making
his conclusions he is very up front about the fact that the evidence is
sketchy and his conclusion is tentative. He makes no effort to persuade you
that his view is absolutely correct and he is careful to show the limits of
probability around his presentation. 

The value of Charlesworth's book is in the journey. It is in learning all
the fine points of the gospel and its history. Once the basics are grasped
you are in a position to judge the value of the various claims being made.

One the other side of the coin you have some one like Michael Baigent and
his co-authors whose books Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the Messianic Legacy
inspired the Da Vinci Code. These works are more fun to read, more
entertaining. The authors are more committed to their points of view. They
recognize how radical their claims are and they relish being outsiders. They
too present as tenuous, the facts and history surrounding their subject
matter. But they are at pains to characterize the "received view" as equally
tenuous. You come away believing any of it more because of the author's
rhetoric than their evidence. The biggest value of these works is to cast
doubts on the prevailing views on these matters. 

On the one hand you have a scholar playing a cautious game and on the other
crusaders smashing icons. Now I like to read both but while Charlesworth
sets my bullshit detector to humming. Baigent and company make is ring like
it is meant to wake the Dalmatians. 

I have read enough of this kind of stuff in a variety of fields over the
years and my bullshit detector is pretty finely tuned. I have not read
Kingsley but just the little I have read about him sets my detector to
tingling. I have read a bit of Wilber and he is at two alarms and climbing
the more I read.

My point was only that Parmenides doesn't sound like much of a Taoist to me
whereas his rival Heraclites does. 

Taoism is about change and the tension and harmony between opposites. It is
about living with a proper understanding and relationship to this change.
While it speaks of oneness and the absolute it does not seem to hold that
this is a static condition at all, rather unity is reveled through
opposition and the merger and transformation of opposites into one another.

The quotes below don't really do much to alter my view. You seem to present
Wilber taking doubt cast by Kingsley to justify some connection between
Plato and Nagarjuna. I would not dispute similarities in the thought of some
of the thinkers in the early traditions of both East and West but I would
hope there is a more straightforward to seeing them.

For example from the quotes you supplied:'...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."

Since Plato wrote some where about 400 BC and Nagarjuna wrote some where
about 200 AD wouldn't it be more proper to say that Nagarjuna was the first
Buddhist to write like a Greek?

Case

---------------------------
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."