Parmenides of Elea: Logic Demands a Changeless Universe by Leonard Peikoff

now let us turn to a philosopher who flourished about 20 years after Heraclitus about 480 BC and who represents the diametric opposite viewpoint Parmenides p AR and en i des Parmenides comes from the town of Elea ela and so his philosophy is frequently referred to as eliot assist or the le attic philosophy Parmenides is the first and judging by the fragments that we have to support his convictions with reasoned argument the first we have a connected whole poem of his extent and he does not simply announced and Heraclitus is miraculous in his conclusions but lets us in on the actual reasoning that he had doctor he has profoundly opposed to Heraclitus his views the view that everything is an identity of opposites or that nothing is everything is becoming his entire philosophy derives from one basic principle which I will give you in my own words but the substance of it is his prison what is is and what is not is not and what is not can neither be nor be thought about I repeat that because that is the essence of Parmenides what is is and what is not is not and what is not can neither be nor be thought about now if you want to hear Parmenides own formulations of this I'll quote you some of his fragments quote from Parmenides come now I will tell thee and do thou hearken to my saying and carry it away the only two ways of search that can be thought of the first namely that what is is and that it is impossible for it not to be is the way of belief for truth is its companion the other namely that what is is not that I tell thee is a path that none can learn of at all for thou canst not know what is not that is impossible nor utter it Heraclitus Heraclitus says everything is and isn't and I hope our manatee says absolutely not if it isn't in regard to the heretic license he has very pointed words here first of them in one fragment quote as mortals knowing not who wandered too faced helplessness guides the wandering thought in their breasts and they are born along stupefied like men deaf and blind undiscerning crowds who hold that it is an is not the same and not the same in that all things travel in opposite directions unquote in other words out with the Uruk license and one more fragment from him for this shall never be proved that the things that are not are and do thou restrain thy thought from this way of inspiring now what does it mean his basic principle well it is of course the earliest formulation in the history of thought of what iron Rand in Gault speech formulates as existence exists and its meaning is the same and therefore it includes the following elements first there is a reality which he refers to as what is that which exists reality exists and only reality exists what is is it's only what is is what is not is not and another point implicit what is not can never be thought about in other words all thought must be thought about existence about what is it is impossible according to Parmenides ever to think about what is not or to know what is not or to have any cognitive relation of any kind to what is not now if you doubt this perform a mental experiment right now try I want you for a second to think about nothing now I don't mean the letters and oth because that's something and I don't mean a black wall that's something I mean nothing absolutely nothing what is not okay go ahead and have a thought now you see you cannot do it because as soon as you think you think about something you think about what is and thus Parmenides famous line thou canst not know nor I don't know what is not it's simply empty there is no what is not and therefore you can think about it and this of course is the view that ultimately appears in golf speech as the in the developed full developed philosophy is the view that consciousness is the Faculty of perceiving that which exists in this sense the earliest source of these crucial ideas are Parmenides and he is therefore an extremely important and in this respect and extremely good philosopher we can put his viewpoint another way in order to prepare ourselves for the conclusions the consequences that he derived from if thought is always about reality all was about what is then it is untenable and invalid ever to hold a con of sheer non-existence in other words of what is not because that would be a concept of nothing in other words it would be no concept his key point in this respect is to put it in a sort of funny way but this is really the essence of it there is no nothing there is only something's and the thought about nothing is therefore not a thought about anything it's not a thought at all all concepts must be formed with in existence and refer to existence and therefore any theory or any philosophic position which at any point requires a concept of here not of non-existence according to Parmenides is invalid on that grounds and must be dismissed right away now on this basis Parmenides drew a number of systematic deductions here they are number one the universe must be uncreated could never have come into existence why well if there was an origin a beginning to what is then what existed before well if it wasn't what is it had to be what is not but what is not is not there is no nothing and therefore there could never have been a state of nothing preceding the state of something in other words the universe must always have existed it could not have been created so much for the religious view now I may say that on the basis of this reasoning no Greek philosopher ever believed the universe was created out of nothing that is a distinctively and exclusively Jewish Christian doctor never accepted by the most mystical Greeks on the basis of Parmenides principle secondly in the other direction the universe must be indestructible it could never go out of existence because if it went out of existence meaning by the universe of course everything which is what would be left what is not what what is not is not and can never be and therefore the universe must be indestructible it always will exist now if you put these two points together we can say that according to Parmenides the universe is therefore eternal it has no beginning and knowing third point focusing now within the universe can there be such a thing as a vacuum as an empty space completely empty now a real little zero inside the physical world to which Parmenides answers absolutely not what is not is not all there is is what is and therefore there is no such thing as a real vacuum this was later came to be expressed in Latin the universe is a plate of pl en un which means it is solidly packed the actual word means full it's completely full there is no little holes in it no little spaces no little nothings in one big slab of stuff huge ball of tightly packed matter now for other reasons which are irrelevant he happened to believe that it had the shape of a sphere apparently because he thought there was no good reason why I should bulge in one direction and not the other but that's beside the point well so far giving you several of his deductions his principle what is is it's really the basic law of law chicken and that's empty sometimes called the father of logic although that's pretty indirect because he didn't know that it had anything to do with thinking as a principle of a guiding thinking he certainly launched an all-out attack on Heraclitus and raised hell with religion so he's made a good start but Parmenides do another deduction from his basic principle which in his opinion was just as obvious as all the preceding ones and that's where all the trouble comes in he drew as a forth conclusion the idea that change is impossible change of any kind motion alteration occurrence of any kind therefore according to his viewpoint there is no such thing as talking moving writing swimming planets orbiting the Sun all of that is a gigantic illusion now why how did he draw such a conclusion well take a simple example of change and to vary it I won't make it to match let's take a seed growing into a flower now at the beginning of the change at the beginning the seed represents what is what about the flower at the beginning flower is not at the end of the change what happened to the seed it's gone it's what is not what happened to the flower well of course it's now there it's what is and that of course is true every change something goes away and something comes to be what does it mean that change is a double violation he concluded of his principle every change is a simultaneous passage from what is to what is not and from the other aspect from what is not to what is but there is no what is not and you can't think about what is not and therefore a change according to him is just as irrational as the idea of the universe being created or going out of existence it involves reference to what is not and what is not is not therefore he concluded there no change at all the world is completely motionless in every respect now you see here that there is a sense in which he is in complete agreement with Heraclitus both of them agree with the following crucial viewpoint change implies a contradiction change implies a violation of logical Heraclitus from the aspect that at the end of the change the thing is it isn't what it was and Parmenides from the aspect that at the end of the change you have what is not becoming what is a vice versa and that's a contradiction since what is not is not now given this common premise they of course take diametrically opposite views Heraclitus says change is obvious therefore to hell with logic Parmenides says logic is obvious therefore the hell with change but the common denominator is you have to make your choice it's either logic or change either identity or change now just to make it a little worse the two things I said that the Greeks were primarily concerned with at this early stage was changed in multiplicity well having denied change Parmenides went on with apparently equal consistency to denying multiplicity there is no multiplicity there are no variety of things why well he like everybody at this early period was a monist member of monist means somebody who believes there's only one stuff which makes up the world but in addition he believes that the world is a plano solidly packed there are no spaces well then he asked what in the world would make one thing different from anything else how would you draw a line and say here's one thing and here's another the world is one solid undifferentiated slab of one stuff which has no spaces between so there's nothing to separate one thing another thing we have to therefore say that multiplicity is an illusion the world is just a hunk of undifferentiated stuff there's nothing to distinguish one part from the other again there are no entities putting in another way there's just one entity everything when he called the one and you can see why see it's no longer the one in the mini because there many are gone no it's just the one now that believe it or not is the ancestor of the question God by several transmutations and permutations Parmenides one became the god of Christianity but it took quite a while for it to happen so the world is simply emotionless changeless undifferentiated ball of tightly packed batter now needless to say this is not the way it appears to our senses it appears as though there is multiplicity it appears as though there's change what is Parmenides answer same as hair claims the senses are deceptive they give us only the world of appearances which is not true reality true reality is the motionless one and it is arrived at by logic not by the senses by a reason as he interpreted reason and therefore again we have rationalism epistemological our amenities like Heraclitus only coming to the opposite conclusion what is wrong with his reasoning again I'll wait till Aristotle because one of Aristotle's main assignments in metaphysics was to answer Heraclitus and answer Parmenides and to do so Aristotle carved out certain concepts which he originated which had never existed before and which we use to this day and he said those are the only concepts by reference to which we can answer apologies so we'll see when we get to Aristotle now you see that people are in a very dreadful position philosophically now we have a catastrophe almost at the very outset of Western philosophy one philosopher with an array of argument that seemed persuasive at the time to prove that everything is change and there are no things another philosopher with an array of arguments which seemed convincing to prove that nothing changes and there's only the motionless one what are we gonna do to reconcile these two philosophers to take their arguments and somehow make sense of it all that was the task of subsequent philosophy never properly answered till the time of Aristotle now we haven't finished with Parmenides though because he had a famous follower namely Zeno ze oh and he lived around between 490 and 430 BC and he is famous for devising a series of paradoxes which purport to prove two things some of them purport to prove that motion is impossible thus carrying out Parmenides principle and some of them purport to prove one in particular that multiplicity is impossible now I'm going to give you one of each they all involve the same kind of reasoning only sometimes it's more obvious and sometimes not and again I'm not going to answer them tonight because Aristotle devoted his attention to answering them and in the process had some very valuable things about the nature of infinity I'll just present to you two of Zeno's paradoxes and you can get an idea why the dreadful position people were in at the time because they couldn't answer Zeno and they knew something had to be wrong well his most simple one about motion is that it's impossible to cross a room why is it impossible to cross a room Wow consider to cross a room you first of all have to cross half of it what to cross half of it first of all have to cross half of that quarter of it in other words and across that you first of all have to cross half of it an eighth and of course first a sixteenth and so now he has how many times can a distance be subdivided and his answer was theirs knowing if you say one zillions of the distance well there's always one absence of the distance you can divide without end in other words you can subdivide infinitely but how can you possibly cross an infinite number of distances no matter how tiny tiny they are because to cross any distance would take some time no matter how little and to cross an infinite number of distances would take any infinite amount of time but you die in 40 or 50 or 60 years and therefore you obviously couldn't cross that a rule or any distance for that matter and therefore motion is an illusion now this would apply to the motion of his tongue honoring the argued his tongue to get from the upper power to the lower has to cross half the distance but that's his viewpoint there are other trickier ones but they all involved the same idea you see what you can do with that for the next three or four weeks now one of his paradox is on multiplicity multiplicity is the view that the world consists of a number of things for instance you and you than you and this or you can take it on the level of atoms if you want or on the level of galaxies doesn't make any difference to the argument now Zeno is going to argue that this is impossible the world in other words cannot be a whole compiled composed of parts it has to be one indivisible slab not a whole comprised of parts now why well he says I'll show you that the idea that the universe has parts is filled with impossible contradictions well for instance let's imagine the universe is a hole which has many parts and let us ask what would the size of the universe be how many parts does the world have he says according to the people who believe in such a thing as parts well if we keep on subdividing how many parts will the world end up having well this is obviously it'll end up with an infinite number of parts because every magnitude is theoretically divisible without limit so if we break the world up into one footlong things we can break each of those up into two 6-inch things in each of those into four threes in those into four three-inch things and so on and so on there's no theoretical and so if we keep going you have to grant that there is an infinite number of parts and if there's an infinite number of parts no matter how small each of them is we must have an infinitely big universe because infinity times any amount is big loss we reached the conclusion that if the universe consists of parts it must be infinitely large but now look at it another way what will be the size of the ultimate parts the ultimate constituents when we finally reach them now he says there has to be such ultimate indivisible parts otherwise we can't talk meaningfully about the world being a whole consisting of parts if you go to say a hole there has to be parts and that means there ultimately has to be something which is no longer divisible but now aimée magnitude as we've seen is divisible so what must be the size of the ultimate parts if they're to be even in theory indivisible they must be zero in size the ultimate particles are constituents in the world must have no magnet but if a universes has parts which have no size what will be the size of the hole obviously it won't have any size an infinite number of zeros is still zero so if there is multiplicity on the one hand you must have an infinitely big universe which has endless parts and on the other hand an infinitely small universe which has sizeless parts and that's an impossible contradiction and therefore the premise must be wrong there is no multiplicity therefore Parmenides was right after all there's only the one the universe is in principle indivisible that's the end of it now until we get to Aristotle's answer to this and this as you see involves the same kind of issues pertaining to infinity an infinite subdivision that the other paradox did in all of his - and you need a certain theory of the nature of infinity but until we get there if you don't know it's okay to go home you can't assume pragmatically that you are one part and your home is another and motion between the two is possible and how we validate that philosophically will discuss in several weeks is there any such thing as a vacuum or the universe completely filled with matter of some sort I agree with Parmenides I believe his argument on this point is unanswerable that there is no nothing there consequently no such thing is he true vacuum you know there was a 2-0 inhabiting yeah reality anywhere this does not mean however that everything is necessarily solidly packed with matter in the form that we now know it simply that it must be packed with something now what it is that it's filled with I do not comport to know there used to be theories in the 19th century that the world's empty places so-called were filled with even and that the universe was solidly filled in that heat there was the medium by means of which energy traveled action at a distance was able to take place and so on I believe ultimately some form of that theory some form will have to be sustained on philosophic grounds but again I refer you to the distinction between philosophy of the science I wouldn't dream of speculating what is it that is present in what we regard as a vacuum after all we do not know everything about the physical universe and the fact that we are able to pump out or discover areas with the absence of the most matter that we now can identify does not per se prove the existence of a vacuum a long time ago some of us used to use the term humorously I may say little stuff little stuff was the name we gave to that which is where nothing isn't but what it is we do not purport to know what I say just to repeat that one of the problems of the early philosophers was their failure to differentiate various kinds of change well certainly they didn't differentiate and certainly it was a major step forward when Plato and Aristotle began to classify and say there's change of place locomotion and change of substance when a thing come into existence as the flower versus the seed and change of quantity what a thing gets bigger and change of quality you know and so on and when you could time to get to Aristotle you have a sophisticated view of all the types of change you find that many of the problems that they got into disappear because they were confusing one type of change with another in that sense yes that was a problem but I would never want to say anything that would imply they should have done differently or that that is a criticism of them because after all this is the kindergarten of mankind and they are regardless of their errors they heroes who made the first steps so I mean surely if they have known what came centuries later they would have been better but on the other hand if they hadn't done what they did who later centuries couldn't have developed so I'm always when someone in the twentieth century says everything flows and nothing abides I have a completely different attitude than I do toward Heraclitus how could Parmenides think of a shape for the universe what would be outside that shape what in the universe have to be infinite without shape no it would not I agree with Parmenides on that point if you asked him I'm not necessarily with the idea of it being a sphere I don't pretend to know what shape the universe has but I agree with Parmenides and so did Aristotle and so on is not weighted Einstein if you want scientific authority that the universe is finite and has some structure and some kind of shape and that does not imply any outside of the universe the simple question - what is outside the universe is there is no outside the universe outside the universe is a meaningless phrase it does not designate a locality which is empty it designates no locality there is no such place as outside the universe all that exists is the universe now in asking that question you necessarily have to project yourself as being outside the universe and you're looking at it from the outside and you see this big ball in the real all the space outside but you can't project yourself outside the universe you can only project yourself within the universe and therefore from that perspective there is no difficulty in thinking of the universe is finite limited shaped but you cannot visualize its shape because to do so you'd have to stand outside the best I can recommend to you as a mental exercise is imagine a little dot in your mind and let it fill up from the inside out until it occupies your entire mental screen and do not try to peep beyond it and then you've got the universe when I say that which is not as not as that a principle about nothing no it's a principle denying nothing it's a principle saying you cannot have principles about nothing because there is no nothing so it is not about nothing it is indirectly about something it tells you one thing about something namely something is all there is

Channel: Ayn Rand Institute

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Keywords: history of philosophy, history, philosophy, history of western philosophy, western philosophy, leonard peikoff, ayn rand, ayn rand institute, objectivism, objectivist, political theory, modern philosophy, ancient philosophy, school of life, crash course, lecture, educational video, secular humanism, Parmenides of Elea, parmenides, logic, change theory, change

Id: E-Gua4O3P6o

Length: 30min 12sec (1812 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020