[MD] Parmenides the Taoist

[david buchanan]

Case and all:

Case said:
In making his conclusions he is very up front about the fact that the 
evidence is sketchy and his conclusion is tentative. ..On 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. ...

dmb says:
Yea, Wilber does declare that his assertions were speculative, etc.. I 
didn't bother to quote that part of it simply because it goes without 
saying. And when hundreds of young scholars have done their Ph.D. work on 
Dan Brown's work you can compare him to Wilber. Until then, such a 
comparison will continue to be ridiculous.

Case said:
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.

dmb says:
I also take pride in my sensitivity to bullshit. But in this case, Case, I 
think one ought to be careful to distinguish between an unusual 
interpretation on the one hand and old fashioned bullshit on the other.

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

dmb says:
Yea, I know. My point was to explain WHY Parmenides doesn't sound like a 
Taoist unless one is dealing with the unusual interpretation offered by 
Wilber, Gallagher and Kingsley, each of whom arrives at this unusual 
interpretation independently of each other, by the way.

Case said:
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. 
...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?

dmb says:
I think Plato, Parmenides and Buddha live at the same time. Lao Tsu was in 
there somewhere close in time too. But that's not how Wilber works and he's 
not talking about a direct influence as in who was reading the other guy's 
books or anything like that. Wilber's "method" is to take all the biggest 
and most influential ideas and temporarily, at least, assume they are true. 
He lays them all out on the table, so to speak, steps back and asks himself, 
now what sort of system would accomodate the greatest number of these 
"truths"? What sort of view could make sense of them all, or at leasr as 
many as possible? Then once they've been sorted out, with a few not quite 
making the cut, he finds a place for them within the whole view and sets 
about criticizing the pieces he's just installed. But instead of being 
skeptical about whether or not they are "right", he shows how they are 
partial or incomplete. He uses the assembled "truths" to supplement each 
other. Because of this approach, he's concluded that some thinkers and some 
"truths" we more complete than others, more developed than others and these 
figures become the stars of the show. That's where the Plato-Nagarjuna 
comparsion comes in. The pieces he uses come from East and West, religion 
and psychology, philosophy and physics. Basically, its a global, 
evolutionary metaphysics much like the MOQ.

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