Parmenides

Nothing does not exist. Everything that exists, clearly exists. Since there is no such thing as nothing for existence to emerge from, all existence must necessarily already exist.

There is no coming into being user, this greek motherfucker rationally determined that matter cannot be created or destroyed 2500 years ago with just his big brain.

This is very well explained. Thanks user.

Heyyy I found my notebook, so I can explain things a bit further. So the central gamble Parmenides makes is that if reality is intelligible, and you find something thoroughly unintelligible, then it cannot be a part of reality. So moving on from there, he established two domains, 'what is' and 'what is not'. Thinking and speaking can only be about what is, because what is not is unintelligible and therefore not a part of reality (as per the preceding premise). The rest follows from there. Everything he speaks of thereon and before is a description of reality ('what-is'), and 'what-is-not' can only be inferred about by contrast. But Parmenides would consider this a mistake, because trying to apply intelligible terms to the unintelligible is incoherent for him.

Both kinda. Change, for Parmenides, is an illusion. He's not clear about the nature of this illusion in the 160 verses we have (of 800, originally). But he is clear that Being-Itself is completely unchanging.

if change is illusory what happens after we die

>this greek motherfucker rationally determined that matter cannot be created or destroyed 2500 years ago with just his big brain
but hes wrong lol

What he thought, we don't really know. What we have suggests that he'd probably regard it as nothing significant

i do not see how you can move from the premise 'what 'is not' necessarily 'is' as it is intelligible' to 'change is impossible'
or, i see that if you take as a necessary premise for change 'that which is not', then, 'not-being', that which would come about by change cannot, for it 'is not'. but 'not being' is intelligible, and therefore 'is', and therefore change 'can be'.

>if reality is intelligible, and you find something thoroughly unintelligible, then it cannot be a part of reality
I wonder then what he thought about subjectivity. How would he have seen a concept that you understand but I do not? Or was his point that some things are just objectively knowable, and some things are not?

Change carries with it the notion of coming-to-be, which entails something which wasn't now being, and that doesn't work for Parm

but if it is emergent from that which is, what's the problem? and if 'change' is 'intelligible', it necessarily 'is', right?

The weak answer would go something like "Ideas which can be thought of are intelligible, while those which cannot are not. Some ideas are only intelligible to certain subjects, but they are nonetheless intelligible. Nonbeing cannot be thought of by anyone regardless of capability, axiomatically." Which is the objectively knowable move you mentioned.

The strong answer would probably discount other perspectives, but I don't think that works because if a perspective can be uttered by a thinking subject then it is real.

That's exactly Heraclitus's thought on change which Parmenides disagreed with. For Heraclitus, the change of dynamic objects is exactly what defines them. A river is a river because it flows, a raindrop is a raindrop because it falls, and a tree is a tree because it grows and decays etc.. But Parmenides saw all these states as different expressions of Being itself. The decaying tree is very literally not the living tree in the sense that it is one object changing over time. rather they are both only unified as what is. Our perception of their oneness as a single object is the illusion.

sounds like the moving image of eternity.

Some things exist. Some things do not exist. Stop talking about things that dont exist, they dont exist so there is no point. Everything that exists has always existed, so it's ok to talk about them

Parmenides differentiates between "existence" and "being". A unicorn may not exist, but it *is* i.e. has being

Well then name 1 (ONE) thing that *isn't*.

If you can name it, then it would become.
An oblorckighen doesn't exist and it didn't become until I just typed it.

>as if I were a mentally challenged 5 year old
So you wanna understand Parmenides while pretending that whats is not is?

Parmenides makes a leap from (1) the fact that certain linguistic features of how we talk about "not-being," or seem to invoke "not-being" while also making statements of being (i.e., predicating), lead to (it seems) paradoxical or self-contradictory conclusions, to (2) the surmise that this paradox holds good ontologically, in terms of real reality ("being") in and of itself, and that to speak correctly (i.e., to resolve the paradox) is to speak correctly with regard to the being of the cosmos itself, which means (3) we have to jettison or resolve some of the paradoxical features of the linguistic/logical situation. Parmenides argues in favour of jettisoning talk of not-being altogether, saying that only "being" is really actual.

With the exorcism of not-being goes also the exorcism of becoming (because the concept of becoming logically, i.e., linguistically, relies on a concept of not-being, which has been jettisoned), and therefore temporality, therefore change, etc.

but
???

parmenides's argument after aristotle

Nothing major.

There is being.

what is the illusion of change, becomonh, motion, and so on, then? i mean what is its nature? why is there illusion in the first place? and how *could* there be illusion if the cosmos is necessarily unitary, eternal, and so on? doesn't the notion of illusion entail a dualism, if only between 'right thought' and 'wrong though'? and, again, how could there be 'wrong thought'--or any thought whatsoever--in a static, unchanging, motionless world? doesn't thought take place in time? a syllogism must *proceed* from premises to conclusion, yes? so even establishing the static nature of the cosmos would require a movement of thought to do so. and if cosmos is identical with thought then you're argukent is in even worse shape!
someone explain please.

i demand answers

>tfw Non-Being is more real than Being

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the fuck is "more real"

youtu.be/_9FMi0STEro
rather be buried than be worried

energy can't be created or destroyed

one could probably argue that the reality of a perspective has no bearing on its truth value, since a person can easily have wrong opinions. the only truth is the fact of perspective-having, the perspective itself can either be right or wrong based on how accurately it conforms to the world as it is

there is only one thing that isn't and it can't even be named only refered to as negated existence

So unicorns are real?

not only real, but also very gay

People who do not understand Parmenides simply have not spent enough time reading philosophy and philosophizing themselves. Easiest give away.

you are the one to answer my questions then, master

Plato addressed that.

okay. what did plato say?

From what I remember in Richard D. McKirahan's book, it's not clear that Parmenides actually was a monist, even if he is portrayed that way in Plato's dialogue and his follower Melissus definitely was. His language could also be read as suggesting that all things are independent, stand on their own, and are not modified by other things, but not necessarily that there's only one in number. Whether that strictly works in the context of his system is another question but as for what he's arguing himself it could be read both ways.

If you see some whitehead threads in future there is at least one Parmenides fag (though he is poorly read imo) in there who you can have better discussions with than here, but I will tell you what I understand from reading secondary literature and talking to greek philology students and professors:
The most essential thing to understand when reading the poem is that "hopos estin" (that is) and "hopos ouk estin" (that not is) is used in possibly various ways.
Firstly you have to look at how it is used in conection with a subject: 1) the subject is so obvious or context related, 2) it is more of a general subject, or 3) the subject is not necessary, but "... is" is complete and coherent in itself. The last one is understandable by realizing that a subject is not necessary in ancient greek, i.e. "hyei - it rains" needs no subject.
Secondly and equally important is that it "...is" or "...is not" can either be an existential "is", a predicative, a mix up of the two (ambiguity), a veritative "is" (anything predicative can be said as existential), or finally a true fusion of the two. This is partly also attributed to the fact that the differentiation between the two (existential vs rpedicative) wasn't possible in ancient greek for him so that Parmenides wasn't able to differentiate between the existential or the predicative "is" causing this daoism tier text. This allows us to read the applicable "is" at each point and understand that the true "is" the goddess Dike revealse is different from the "is" of the stupid retarded humans, allowing us to say, think things that are not of the true existance but are solely to us as humans.
Add to this to that Parmenides has to use a langauge that is "able to describe non existance" while vehemently defending this impossibility. So similar to Wittgenstein's ladder we have to toss aside the work after realizing its inherent flaw or use the points made from the poem to discredit the aspects of it eventhough they are exactly what helped us come to the true realisation of true being.

Add my theory on top that the true is is the noumenon and the fleshly human is is the phenomena and you can more easily understand how the impossible "is" is simply wrong, allows change, wrong ideas of things, wrong things to be said, etc. due to our own fault while all this is solely building on the true "is" that is never changing, one, inseperable, homogenous, continuous, immovable and figuratively comparable to a sphere.

>this is how I have come to understnad and appreciate it, hope it helps. criticize it and keep the thread bumped if you care for a response
If you read this far, post a cute (fem)boy as payment like the discord trannies post :)

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I'm not smart enough to grasp anything you said. My only question is whether girls like femboys/cuteboys, in your knowledge? Is masculinity just a meme, or is it really the ideal of a man they appreciate most?

think of the conservation of mass and energy nothing is create only changes because it already exists.

Girls, though they deny it, love nothing more than seieng two cute guys kiss.
Boys want nothing more than to kiss the ideal perfection of themselves as in when they are most cute/handsome masculine.
In the end veryone profits.
>also, read Lysis and Symposium
now give me cuties, I'm not joking

But Parm doesn't believe in change

my gf :_:

>found my post from the thread
I have no idea about Whitehead because I am not convinced enough to buy into this new Yea Forums meme jsut yet, but to the Parmenidesfag:
First off, I haven't read the platonic dialogue (yet), since there is no real point in reading that to learn what Parmenides teaches ,since it is jsut a strawman interpretation meant to help further solidify Platon's idea world conept, but I have read the original Poem, and a couple secondary literature, specific to Parmenides or at least where Parmenides was discussed in works that generally deal with the rpe Socratic 'Philosophy'.
It is essential to me, for when trying to understand the poem itself that one has to be aware of the multiple different uses of "estin" (is) with a subject in for example "that is" (hopôs estin) and "that not is" (hopôs ouk estin), such that - I'm having to translate from german - (1) "... is" can either be attributed to a context or an obvious Subject, (2) the subject is general or undefined, (3) the subject is not encessary, the "is" or "is not" is complete in itself. The last one (3) can be compared to "hyei - it rains" where no subject is encessary in ancient greek.
From this there are also the different usage of "estin" as a copula for predicates exists in comparison to the existential "estin" from which the different usages in the poem itself can be taken from, so that it is more than likely that Parmenides doesn't use the same "estin" each time, alrgely attributed to the ancient greek language where it simply is not (easily) differentiable. So there exist different interpretations, either the "existential", the "predicative", the "mix-up"(wrong understanding of which is), the "veritative" (predicative can always be seen as existential), the "fusion" (existential and predicative not clearly seperated) theses for the "is".
This should allow us to not have to choose between either the existential Being or a descriptive interpretation of Being, both are not consistent with respective parts of the poem, but rather allow us to choose the proper "is" where applicable. IMO this should give way to the noumena (noumenon) and phenomena understanding of Being.
One which the goddess Dike says is the true Being, the noumenon, and the other the human faulty pehomenal Being (the true path vs the wrong path). By this you can still accept the parts in the poem where we can only speak or think what truly IS while saying that the differentiation between the subjects are only fleshly differentiable but actually only part of the true Bing that is whole, one, homogenous, continuous, inseperable, never changing, immovable, and comparable (figuratively) to a ball (the phenomenoloigcal "is" being built on the true "is").
Doing this we allow the ideas of change, time, the aristotle accident - Akzidens (english is retarded), speaking, thinking, etc. while realizing they are not true being but rather the (aristotele's) Substance as the one true path of Being.

>this greek motherfucker rationally determined that matter cannot be created or destroyed 2500 years ago with just his big brain.
This was already accepted, according to Aristotle:
>some at least of those who maintain it to be one-as though defeated by this search for the second cause-say the one and nature as a whole is unchangeable not only in respect of generation and destruction (for this is a primitive belief and all agreed in it), but also of all other change

>a primitive belief and all agreed in it
This is pretty amazing desu, fuckin greeks man.

i want at least one sincere (you)

It still isn't. What you "made" is a simple conjecture of latin alphabet letters that happen to provide no meaning.

why are germans so weird

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There is no ''emerging'' for Parmenides. ''Change does'' not emerge, it is - as static. What we see as change, as dynamism, is static.

Let me lay it out for you. Consider change for example.

>1. Change involves going from one state to another state
>2. Going into another state involves NOT being in the previous state
>3. it is impossible to speak of NOT being as only being exists.
> 3 negates 2 which negates 1.
> Therefore there is no change.

Same with matter, you can change it's location or it's composition, but all atoms have some origin

Read the poem before the platonic dialogue or is it not necessary?

Again, existence and 'isness' are two different things for Parmenides.

Parmenides also seems to discard the ''dualisms'' of language, so to speak. There is no symbiotic relationship between antitheses, so being can be without non-being. (or, non-being is of a quality that allows this particular set of opposites to exist without the one part, as the non-existing part is non-existence.)

Calling other anons weird while posting 19th century cartoon Lolis

yeah, i get *that* he says this. what i want to know *how* he can justify a contradictory claim like 'change is static'. what does that mean? change is obvious, so how is it illusory? and if it is illusory, how is that claim consistent with his 'monism' given

was parmenides basically just early wittgenstein, only even more caught up in the language trap?

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so, what? existence is the immutable being as-such? 'isness' the imperfect expression that existence?
whence the dualism? if thought and being are simultaneous, how is erroneous thinking (and so erroneous speaking) possible?

>if thought and being are simultaneous, how is erroneous thinking (and so erroneous speaking) possible?
It *is* possible. It is.

that's just a confusion (or, less charitably, an equivocation) of the different grammatic functions of the verb to be.
if thought and being are simultaneous, ineed if thought and being are identical; and if being is simple, that is, indivisible; then how can there be error i.e. division between thought and being?

Lol it’s like the first recorded discovery ever nigga like just read it

Think of it this way:

A white wall is white. In ordinary language, you can say the white wall is not black. Parmenides says that this is nonsense because “not is” isn’t a real quality. You have to rake in consideration that “being” is taken here as an action. Something that “is” is actively being what it is. It is a physical impossibility to actively not-be. For example, the white wall isn’t not-being black or any other color. That doesn’t make sense. Not-being (as in the action of not being something) isn’t possible. Therefore, if you run with this logic you fall in the conclusion that difference can’t possibly exist. This is what we know as a language game.

He equates "non-being" with "non- existant"

Could one begin to explain the idea to by saying, "ideas exist"? Would that be accurate / illustrate the point of non-being enclosed in being?

doesn't activity suggest motion and change? if being is active then it must act, and all action must take place over time.

As far as I understand it the unmanifest that Guenon writes about is not the same as Parmenidean non-being, because according to Parmenides non-being doesn't exist while Guenon and the Vedanta texts he references both say that the unmanifest is not nothingness or non-existence. The manifest and unmanifest are each considered to be ultimately unreal distinctions contained within the undivided Supreme principle itself, the manifest is sorta the furthest from reality insofar as its delimited by form whereas the unmanifest is less unreal because its limitless but both are considered to be unreal in an absolute sense, there is not considered to be any 'void' or 'nothingness' outside of these because the Supreme principle is infinite and contains all. So I believe that both the un- and manifest would be contained within Parmenidies concept of 'being' and they would both agree that aside from this there is neither anything nor nothing.

Was Parmenides a determinist?

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If nothing ever actually happens then the question becomes moot

HOW IS THE QUESTION POSSIBLE IF ALL IS ONE?
EVEN THE MOOTING OF THE QUESTION ENTAILS AN ACTION, A PROCESS

>get so triggered over an obvious retarded reply

What's the difference, sorry? Are they not synonymous? How can something "exist" without "being", or vice versa?

I am so pissed off at all you morons and your incapacity of dealing with language.

where are we fumbling?

You’re thinking ontologically here. “Being” as active is an semantical
-etymological aspect of the Greek language.

but parmenides is making a metaphysical/ontological argument.

my balls

sounds uncomfortable for you

the subjective experience of asking and thinking about it is unreal, that's how

how can an experience be unreal? what does that mean? if you mean 'illusory' then how can there be a disjunction between subject and object if reality is singular and indivisible? how can there be 'room' for even the possibilty of illusion given the identity of thought.and being?

And this prevents him from letting the language he speaks affect the structure of his thinking?

no. what? i am asking for metaphysical amswers to metaphysical questions.
when someone asks 'what is being?' and you answer 'a verb', you are misunderstanding both the force and direction of the question.

take the Melissus pill

But the point is that you’re metaphysical question is the result of a linguistic misunderstanding. Parmenides can eaisly be refuted by pointing to the fact that difference is a indepensible element of the human experience and Parmenides’ rejection of it is a perversion following from linguistic confusion.

i am not confused. rather, i am giving the parmenidean the benefit of the doubt that he is getting at something deep and interesting and not just fiddling with language's balls.
natural language hand-waiving just leaves a big wet one on the carpet and, sorry, i'm not cleaning that up.

>that he is getting at something deep and interesting and not just fiddling with language's balls.
He isnt getting into anything deeper than what theologians get to when they discuss how many angels fit in the tip of a needle. He is leading you into the rabbit hole of uncritical metaphysics fed by a fundamental misunderstanding of the function of languge

still not cleaning that up

Okay, listen to poetic ramblings and try to squeeze out meaning, when there are tools and structures that you can use in order to critically access whether you are wasting your time or not. Consider how everything around you is just a vague “Oneness” that means nothing, clarifies nothing and explains nothing.

Well it goes a little something like this chap...

YOU ARE NOT REAL YOU DON'T EXIST, YOU ARE A PRODUCT OF REALITY AND A NATURAL PHENOMENA OF EXISTENCE, YOU DO NOT EXIST. YOU ARE FAKE, YOU ARE NOT TRUE FOR NOTHING IS TRUE, YOU ARE FAKE AND GAY. YOUR ARE NOT REAL.

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again, i am challenging the parmenidean. your analytical tools don't seem able to make even the mundanely obvious apparent for you, so i don't see how they'd fare much better against the perplexities of the most abstract.
you haven't convinced me, is what i'm saying.

>we don't talk about that

I explained to you the basic problem in Parmenidean philosophy. Being is assumed to be an active property, therefore not-Being is an impossibility. Parmenideans cant explain their philosophy once this issue is clarified because there is no answer. It a basic assumption of “being” that contradicts the whole message of the philosophy. You are right when you say that saying Being is active presupposes the possibility of change, but if you dont see Being as active, then Parmenides makes no sense and you wont get it.

Phhht all Wigen(((stein))) did was talk about misinterpretation of language.

hurray slam dunk
that was all i wanted

Yes, or at least believed the unchanging order of reality is a continual flow of being within itself of total order and unchanged. In this way we can view determinism within a new life, as time is the totality of falsity for which chaos is the same falsity as in which order unites them. Time is just allowing us humans to have a good time.

>how can an experience be unreal? what does that mean? if you mean 'illusory' then
So, because what we have of Parmenides is supposed to be only a small portion of the text, we don't exactly know how he would have tied up and reconciled all these loose ends. We only can speculate and look to other schools of thought for examples of possible solutions. Some other schools of thought that posit that the phenomenal world/universe are unreal/illusory include Vedanta, Buddhism, areas of Sufism and I believe Sikhism, among others. As to the question of how can an experience be unreal, we can look to dreams as an example of this we all know. Unless you are lucid dreaming, most people believe that dreams are real life and that they are awake; if we take "waking life" as the yardstick of realness in this case then we can say that's an example of an experience which seems real despite it being unreal. The question of how can waking life be unreal is thornier, but dreams are still a proof-of-concept.

I personally see Advaita Vedanta as having the most logical answers to these questions, they deal with the same notions of if Brahman is the unchanging motionless ultimate reality, why and how do we experience change etc. They say that there is beginningless Maya (illusion) which is co-eternal with Brahman, but that it doesn't really exist itself, this doesn't break non-duality/monism because it doesn't actually exist as something to oppose/contrast it and is held to disappear at liberation, revealing that it never existed to begin with. Advaita holds that Brahman is itself Atma, the pure changeless awareness remaining the same at all moments observing and illumining the activity of the mind, which itself is held to be non-consious and unreal. This ties into the question of how can something unreal be experienced, Advaita says that this is only possible because Awareness or the Witness is itself the reality. This is one area where it differs from Buddhism which says the phenomenal world and the witness are both unreal, which Buddhism attributes to beginningless dependent-origination (similar to Maya), although Buddha never provided an explanation for how and why this could have arose or how it could precede in an ordely fashion absent some existent organizing/sustaining X.

Advaita says that just as without the dreamer there wouldn't be the experience of a dream, in the same way the fact that the pure awareness itself is reality is what allows for the subjective experience of unreality, and that if the witnessing consciousness/awareness was unreal there would be no subjective experience of anything. Advaita doesn't explain why Maya exists and considers the question fruitless (because its grounded in Maya), although they at least say Brahman is the reality which Maya is predicated on and which acts as the organizing principle that results in there being order, that you need the rope to exist in the first place before it can be mistaken as a snake. I personally like what Sufism and Neoplatonism have to say on this which can be seen as complementing and fulfilling the Advaita model, that unreal Maya/creation is part of the overflowing of the fullness of God's existence, light streaming off of the sun. The way that Advaita explains their model doesn't violate either the law of non-contradiction or that of the excluded middle, thinking that it does results from misunderstanding the model, if you have questions on this exact point I can answer them.

I personally think that the lost parts of On Nature probably worked out how the illusion of change could be experienced in a similar way.

>how can there be a disjunction between subject and object if reality is singular and indivisible?
If only the subject itself is real and the object isn't actually occuring in reality

>how can there be 'room' for even the possibilty of illusion given the identity of thought.and being?
If thought is unreal (part of the illusion), and if the extent of 'being' which is predicated on identifying with and is mediated through phenomenal existence is unreal; and if the pure self-illuminating capacity of awareness not dependent on anything else (the locus of awareness at the end-point of sensory data/thoughts > mind > witnessing awareness) which is the prism through which everything else is experienced is itself reality.