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What if everything you see moving, changing, and dying is an illusion? That is the shocking claim at the heart of this lecture from Academy of Ideas on Parmenides, the ancient thinker who split philosophy in half with a single idea. Where our senses report a world of birth and decay, he insisted that only reason can reach the truth — and the truth is a single, eternal, unmoving Being. The video walks through his famous argument that ‘nothing comes from nothing,’ shows how it made motion and change seem impossible, and traces how Plato stitched Parmenides’ timeless reality back together with the changing world we experience.
Full Video Transcript
The Presocratics Lecture 4, Parmenides. In this lecture we will direct our attention to the ideas of Parmenides, who elaborated perhaps the most paradoxical and absurd metaphysical account of reality in the history of philosophy.
Parmenides was a Presocratic philosopher who flourished in the first half of the 5th century BC in the Greek colony of Elea, located on the southwest coast of Italy.
Although the conclusions he reached, as we will soon see, were quite preposterous,
he is widely considered the most influential of all the Presocratics.
As William Guthrie explained in the second volume of his History of Greek Philosophy series,
Presocratic philosophy is divided into two halves by the name of Parmenides.
His exceptional powers of reasoning brought speculation about the origin and constitution of the universe to a halt,
and caused it to make a fresh start on different lines.
Parmenides brought speculation about the nature of the universe to a halt
by claiming that our experience of the world is an unequivocal illusion.
Our experience of the world tells us that things move from one place to another,
things are born, things change, and things die.
Parmenides asserted that our experience of the world is illusory,
and in reality nothing moves or changes, and nothing is born and nothing dies.
Furthermore, the truth, according to Parmenides,
is that there are in fact no separate things.
Instead, he asserted that reality is one thing,
that never moves or changes,
but has and will remain the same,
completely motionless and changeless for all eternity.
Describing the universe, Parmenides explained that
it is unborn and imperishable,
whole, unique, immovable, and without end.
It was not in the past, nor yet shall it be,
since it now is, altogether, one and continuous.
The conclusions which Parmenides reached are paradoxical, to say the least.
In fact, according to the etymology of the word paradox, that is exactly what they are.
The word paradox is created by combining para, which means contrary to,
and doxa, which signifies appearances.
Parmenides’ ideas are literally contrary to appearances, or paradoxical.
For while it appears that there are separate things in the world which move
and change,
Parmenides asserted that appearances deceive and
in reality the universe is much different than it appears to be.
According to Parmenides, our senses give us faulty information about the nature
of reality.
And in order to learn the truth regarding the nature of things,
we must rely solely on our mind and powers of reasoning.
With his belief that the senses imprint illusions on our minds,
and his claim that reason alone or the mind’s eye
must be utilized in the attainment of truth, Parmenides was what is now
classified as
an extreme rationalist. So how exactly did Parmenides arrive at his
controversial and paradoxical conclusion that birth, death, change, and motion
are an illusion? His argument started from a very simple
and uncontroversial premise. We can state that
either something exists or it does not exist, or to use his terminology
either it is or it is not. Furthermore, Parmenides asserted that in constructing a philosophical
account of reality, the concept of that which is or that which exists can be utilized, while
the concept of that which does not exist or that which is not cannot be used. Writing
in a convoluted poetic form, Parmenides explained this idea. Come now, I will tell thee the
only two ways of search that can be thought of, the first, namely that it is and that
In other words, non-being, or that which is not, or does not exist, is an illegal concept,
and one that cannot be used in any rational account of the world.
He wrote,
It needs must be that what can be thought and spoken of is, for it is possible for it to be, and it is not possible for what is nothing to be.
It is often mistakenly thought that Parmenides is here making the gross error of claiming that it is impossible to think of something that does not exist.
It is obvious that human beings are able to think of that which does not exist.
In fact, it could be argued that the history of philosophical and religious thought
is evidence that not only is it possible, but very natural,
for humans to think and speak of that which does not exist.
This, however, is likely not what Parmenides was getting at.
His argument is made more cohesive and understandable
if it is assumed that when he says it is impossible to think of that which is not,
he is merely stating that it is impossible to form a concept of nothingness or non-being.
In order to formulate a concept there must be something that is thought of, something
which is the content of the concept.
And a concept of nothingness would be a contentless concept, which by its very nature is an impossibility.
Therefore, since it is impossible to form a concept of nothing, in providing a rational
account of the universe, one cannot utilize non-being, or the concept of that which does
not exist.”
Parmenides looked back on his predecessors, namely the Ionians and Heraclitus, and observed that they spoke of things being born or emerging into the world and perishing from it as if it were the most natural process.
However, Parmenides believed that the very concept of becoming, of things being born, growing, and dying, was an incoherent concept.
The 5th century sophist Gorgias, a contemporary of Parmenides, nicely explained this line of reasoning.
What is cannot have come into being.
If it did, it came either from what is or what is not.
But it did not come from what is, since if it is existent it did not come to be but already is, nor from what is not, for the non-existent cannot generate anything.
In other words, if something is born it must either come from what exists or what does not exist.
If it comes from what exists, it is not born, since it would have already existed.
And it cannot come from what does not exist.
for something cannot be born from nothing.
Becoming, Parmenides concluded, does not exist.
In reality there is only being.
Whatever exists was not born and will not die,
but instead will exist for all eternity.
Along with the fact that Parmenides declared becoming,
and hence birth and death, to be impossible,
he insisted that even movement is an illusion.
And contrary to our perceptions, in reality nothing moves.
His reasoning behind this idea was that for movement to be possible,
a thing must move from where it is now into an empty space. However, he conceptualized
empty space as being that which is not, or non-being. And since non-being is an illegal
concept, so to speak, it is incoherent to state that something moves from its current
position into non-being because it makes no sense to say that non-being or empty space
exists. That would be the same as saying what doesn’t exist does exist, which is a contradiction.
Therefore, he concluded,
According to the dictates of reason, all movement is an illusion.
Parmenides’ philosophy is mind-numbing and confusing.
However, to his credit, he did arrive at his conclusions through sound reasoning.
Yet, the picture of reality he conveyed is disconcerting, to say the least.
James Warren, in his book Presocratics, wrote that
Parmenides left us with an odd and alienating picture of reality.
Following consistently the ban on what is not,
It has turned out that we are left with an unfamiliar reality, which leaves no room for
change, plurality, motion, difference, people, days or nights.
To conclude this lecture we will briefly investigate the enormous impact which Parmenides had on
the mind of Plato.
Plato is said to have constructed his vision of reality by reconciling the ideas of Heraclitus
and Parmenides.
In the last lecture we explained how Heraclitus asserted that everything is constantly in
flux, or in other words, in a constant state of becoming.
and therefore that absolute or unchanging truths do not exist.
Plato was shaken with this insight, and as a man devoted to the attainment of truth,
he could not rest content with the notion that truth did not exist.
It was in the philosophy of Parmenides that he found a way to escape the epistemological nihilism,
or the denial that truths exist, conveyed by the philosophy of Heraclitus.
There are, in fact, two different realms which constitute the universe, Plato concluded.
There is a realm of being, in which things do not change, are not born, and do not die.
And there is a realm of becoming, where things do change, are born, and do perish.
The world of becoming we observe through our senses,
while the realm of being, or the realm of forms as Plato called it,
we discern through the use of our mind or reason.
Truths exist only in the realm of being, or the reality of forms,
and hence, unshakable knowledge can only be obtained through the use of one’s mind.
With respect to the world we experience, the world of becoming, Plato taught that only opinions or beliefs, but never truths, can be ascertained.
In a passage of Plato’s, it is clear that the philosophy of Parmenides, and his permanent and motionless reality of being,
and the philosophy of Heraclitus, and his ever-changing reality of becoming, were merged by Plato into a higher synthesis.
In my opinion, we must first of all make the following distinction.
What is it that always is and has no becoming?
And what, on the other hand, becomes continually but never is?
The one comprehensible by the mind with reasoning,
the other conjectured by opinion with irrational sensation,
coming to be and passing away, but never really being.
However, before Plato reconciled the ideas of Heraclitus and Parmenides,
there were three more main pre-Socratics who had to wrestle with Parmenides’ law against becoming.
As we will see in the coming lectures, these later pre-Socratics
abided by Parmenides’ law that it is impossible for something to emerge from nothing,
and therefore they did away with the notion of becoming.
However, they could not accept his conclusion that nothing moves or changes,
for this idea is in direct contrast to our most basic experience of the world.
These later pre-Socratics made it their mission to save the appearances, so to speak,
and provide a vision of reality which adhered both to Parmenides’ law
and our basic experience of the world which tells us things do in fact move and change.
These later three pre-Socratics which we will consider in the coming lectures are
Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus.
Source: Academy of Ideas