Logic: Greek Skepticism

HERACLITUS

Heraclitus (535 - 475 BCE) was born in Ephesus on the West coast of modern day Turkey.  An educated child of aristocrats, Heraclitus came to an understanding similar to that of the earlier Xenophanes and the later Socrates: No one can ever know the truth entirely, and so we should continue to seek truth endlessly to become wise.  Diogenes Laertius, the historian of philosopher biographies, says Heraclitus was to be king of Ephesus but abdicated the throne to become a sage.  Some scholars have suggested that Heraclitus was in fact Buddha, and that the teachings of Heraclitus, many similar to teachings of the Buddha, came from India into Greece or from Greece into India.  While I am a big fan of cross-cultural transmissions, this is rather far fetched.  It is likelier that Heraclitus and Buddha are both skeptical of human judgements, arguing all things including judgements and truth are impermanent and changing, and this position is found accross human cultures.

Heraclitus was very critical of everyone, particularly the early Greek philosophers and his fellow Ephesians.  Like the Athenians killed Socrates for questioning too much and so “inciting the youth to riot”, Ephesus had exiled Hermadoros because was ‘worthier than average’, presumably doing philosophy and cosmology.  Heraclitus responded:

As for the Ephesians, I would have them all go hang themselves, leaving the city in the abler hands of children, for they banished Hermodorus, the best man among them, saying ‘Let no one of us excel, or if he does let him do it elsewhere among others.  May wealth never leave you, Ephesians, lest your wickedness be revealed.

Just like many other great thinkers, Heraclitus did not like the politics of his day and was critical of traditions of thought in general.  Heraclitus was not, however, sad or angry as much as he was a skeptic.  Heraclitus was called ‘the weeping philosopher’ by a few sources in the ancient world, as well as ‘the dark’ and ‘the obscure’.  Democritus is called the laughing philosopher, and Heraclitus the weeping, both disgusted by humanity.  Juvenal, the Roman poet (not the American rapper) wrote that, given the post popular prayer in temples is for riches, it is no wonder that Democritus laughs and Heraclitus weeps.  In Raphael’s famous painting ‘The School of Athens’, Heraclitus is portrayed looking downward with a somber expression sitting off by himself near the bottom center, unlike other philosophers and scientists who are enthusiastically conversing about the cosmos in groups.

Heraclitus does seem to laugh, and many of his fragments appear playful jokes.  Despising the beliefs, traditions and politics of the day does not make one a sad or angry person relative to others.  Rather, it turns criticism of the other into criticism of the self and one’s own civilization.  Heraclitus was convinced that wisdom and inquiring within show us that all is one big cosmic fire, and things that unify the community and the individual bring wholeness and true happiness.  However, he believed that humans are often foolish and let their minds divide themselves from the whole and from each other such that their understandings are disjointed and ignorant.

Diogenes Laertius says Heraclitus often tired of people and would walk in the hills by himself, similar to the later Heraclitus-influenced German philosopher Nietzsche.  Both wrote that people are apes and only the few become wise and see things as a great individual.  In his Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche wrote in response to the rising German anti-semitism of his time that a race is good for getting to six or seven great men, and then getting around them.

Diogenes Laertius also says that Heraclitus wrote a book ‘On Nature’ which had three parts (the first about cosmology, the second about politics, and the third about theology).  We only have the introduction and various fragments remaining today, known as the Fragments of Heraclitus, but his book was famous among later ancient Greek thinkers.  Heraclitus deposited his book at the Great Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.  Artemis, daughter of Zeus and twin sister of Apollo, was the widely revered Greek goddess of hunting and the wilderness (counterpoint to Apollo, god of agriculture and civilization).

Heraclitus is said by other sources to have been a doctor, and many of his fragments do speak about the workings of physiology within the larger frame of physics as a thinker who is immersed in ancient cosmology would.  Heraclitus believed that the soul, mind and self becomes soggy and intoxicated when one indulges in desire and pleasure (drinking and sex are moist by nature), and likewise when one studies with the fire of the mind and abstains from pleasure the soul dries out.  While this could come from a physician, some fragments seem critical of physicians and the practice of medicine just as others are critical of philosophers, spiritual groups and politics.  In one fragment he writes:

The cosmos works by harmony of tensions, like the lyre and bow.  Therefore, good and ill are one.  Good and ill to the physician must be one, since he derives his fee from torturing the sick.

Heraclitus’ most famous idea is a memorable image: you can never step in the same river twice.  Just as a river is always flowing and changing, so is reality always flowing and changing, such that nothing stays exactly the same for any two moments.  You step in a river, then step out, then step back in the same river, but it is no longer ‘the same river’.  Heraclitus says this is also true of the cosmos and the human individual.  One fragment reads:

We do and do not step into the same river.  We are and are not.

Heraclitus argued that the world is always in flux, as a single thing stable and eternal but as many things in constant change and tension.  Paradoxically, constant change is the stability and being of things.  Rivers flow, fire burns, life thrives, always in motion to be stable in what it is.  If things stop moving and growing the way that they do, they disintegrate and fall apart.  In what often appears as a strange and out-of-place fragment, Heraclitus says, “Goat cheese congeals in wine if not well stirred”.  This is an example of a motion keeping a mixture what it is.  Red wine mixed with goat cheese was a common beverage served at gatherings.

While his famous image is of water in a river, Heraclitus argued that fire is the arche, the most basic element that forms and moves all things.  All things are part of the eternal fire, flowing like water, and ordered by the word/breath/air of the cosmos itself.  While Heraclitus differs from the early Milesians in the selection of fire as his arche, he seems to be bringing Thales (who argued all things are water), Anaximander (who argued that all things are of the one infinite) and Anaximenes (who argued that all things are air) into line with his own position, agreeing yet disagreeing with them.  Heraclitus wrote:

That which always was, and is, and will be ever-living fire, the same for all, the cosmos, made neither by god nor man, replenishes in measure as it burns away…As all things change to fire, and fire exhausted falls back into things, the goods are sold for gold, the gold spent on goods.

Fire is desire and satisfaction.

How, from a fire that never sinks or sets, would you escape?  One thunderbolt strikes root through everything.

Fire also flows, and individual tongues of flame rise out of the fire and then return and integrate with the whole.  Fire, like water, flows in a consistent manner that is always self-similar but never exactly the same twice, just as each person, wave or flame is individual and distinct.  Notice that a thunderbolt, such as that hurled as a weapon by Zeus and which the ancient Greeks thought was made of fire, is the energy and cause of formation for the cosmos, though Heraclitus does not mention Zeus by name.  The Zoroastrians of Persia held fire as the highest element and identified it with their monotheistic god.  It is possible that Heraclitus is influenced by Persian Zoroastrians while taking it in his own direction, just as he does with the work of the Milesian school.  Zoroastrians also believe that the cosmos is ordered by divine speech, by the word and command of the cosmos.  The beginning of Heraclitus’ book, which we still have, reads:

The word proves those first hearing it as numb to understanding as the ones who have not heard, yet all things follow from the word.  Some, blundering with what I set before you, try in vain with empty talk to separate the essences of things and say how each thing truly is, and all the rest make no attempt.  They no more see how they behave broad waking than remember clearly what they did asleep.  For wisdom, listen not to me but to the word and know that all is one.  Those unmindful when they hear, for all they make of their intelligence, may be regarded as the walking dead.  People dull their wits with gibberish, and cannot use their ears and eyes.  Many fail to grasp what they have seen, and cannot judge what they have learned, although they tell themselves they know.  Yet they lack the skill to listen or to speak.  Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way is an impasse.  Things keep their secrets.

The ‘word’ is ‘logos’ in ancient Greek, from which we get the word ‘logic’.  In the ancient world, the art of logic was used for debate and persuasion.  Plato and later Greek philosophers used this conception, but it is first used by Heraclitus.  It is very ironic, quite paradoxical like the thinking of Heraclitus, that he, a serious skeptic, was the first Greek thinker to use this word, which would later be dominated by thinkers such as Aristotle who did not believe in relativity and skepticism.

For Heraclitus, the cosmos resembles the chaos yet order of the human community centered on authority by spoken word.  The LOGOS, the word/plan/order/command, is the formative force in the cosmos, the force of fire and light in the watery chaotic world.  The cosmic fire speaks with its ever-present Logos (fire over air) and this brings about the firmament in the chaos (the earth rising out of the water).  This process, however, does not bring about eternal or stable beings, but chains of beings that are in flux and interdependent, much in line with the Buddhist concept of codependent arising.

This goes also for laws, which Heraclitus says have to be defended as if they were city walls.  This is sometimes read that Heraclitus thought human law was important and had to be defended, which he did, but in fact he is also telling us that human laws, perspectives and judgements are impermanent like walls made out of earth.  They may seem eternal and permanent, but as any former citizen or city of the Persian empire knows, empires fall and impressive city states are overthrown and change hands.  The eternal word of the fire forever forms the cosmos, but human speech and walls are temporary, and therefore take force and effort to maintain.

As a skeptic, Heraclitus believes that the divisions made by the mind are mortal, not eternal, like the human body.  Our knowledge and laws are impermanent like mounds of dirt.  Heraclitus says many things to humble us, including pointing out our similarity to apes to put our achievements in perspective.  Notice in the opening passage that some incorrectly try to separate the essences of things, and the rest are completely ignorant and asleep.  Heraclitus was not a fan of experts and specialists, and he ridiculed the cultural leaders of his time.  He says that the common people are completely asleep, but far more dangerous are the experts who have a small piece of the puzzle and say that they know the entire truth, who have a perspective they confuse with the objective omnipotent view.  Following Xenophanes, Heraclitus argues that we never know the complete truth about anything, which is why we must continue endlessly to gather insights.

Many often ask, “Why, then, should I listen to Heraclitus, since he is simply an expert?”.  Heraclitus replies as most skeptics do: don’t take my word for it, but look into the world and within yourself and you will find that it is true.

Of all the words yet spoken, none comes quite as far as wisdom, which is the action of the mind beyond all things that may be said.  Wisdom is the oneness of mind that guides and permeates all things.

People need not act and speak as if they were asleep.  The waking have one world in common.  Sleepers meanwhile turn aside, each into a darkness of his own.

Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one.

We should not be children of our parents.

Heraclitus does not advocate pessimistic nihilism but continuous pursuit of knowledge and wisdom.  All things change, but this gives us more to know, not less.  It is sad news only if one wants unchanging truths.  Experts who try to separate things from the great flow to know them permanently and in isolation are ignorant of the single unchanging and unified truth: all things are one and all things change constantly.  For Heraclitus, fire is water, day is night, peace is war, and stability is change.  It is good to find the origin of things in their opposites, as this is the last place most would look.

From the strain of binding opposites comes harmony.  The harmony past knowing sounds more deeply than the known.

From tension and strain come harmony, just as the tension in the strings of an instrument allow harmonious and pleasing notes to be played.  We have already heard that satisfaction itself is a form of energy and tension.  The harmony past knowing, the wisdom to see that things are united beyond the distinctions of knowledge and concepts, is more deeply in tune with the universe than partial understandings.

Without injustices, the name of justice would mean what?

The way up is the way back.  The beginning is the end.

As the world works in cycles, we advance to both leave and return from the starting point.  While the starting point is never the same twice, just like a river, to go forward and change is the same as to return and remain what one is.  Some translate the first line here as “The road up is the road down”, which is true of any mountain road: the same road leads both up and down, depending on which way one is facing.

While Heraclitus seems to be an elitist, arguing that only the few are wise and the rest are asleep, he seems to share a similar picture to Confucius in China and earlier Egyptian wisdom proverbs.  While excellent thinking is rare, no one can obtain all wisdom and so one should remember that everyone has some thought and wisdom.  A fragment reads:

Thinking is common to all.

Even so, all human judgements are like child’s toys.  In a passage that sounds very much like Zhuangzi the Daoist patriarch from China, who we will cover next week, using animal perspectives to show that what we value and desire is relative, Heraclitus says:

The language of a grown man, to the cosmic powers, sounds like baby-talk to men.  To a god the wisdom of the wisest man sounds apish.  Beauty in a human face looks apish too.  In everything we have achieved the excellence of apes.  The ape apes find most beautiful looks apish to non-apes.

The sea is both pure and tainted, healthy and good haven to the fish, to humans undrinkable and deadly.  Poultry bathe in dust and ashes, swine in mud.  Donkeys would choose trash over gold.

Two made one are never one.  Arguing the same we disagree.  Singing together we compete.

Dogs bark at everyone they do not know.

The whole is not only a site of conflict, but is also characterized by Heraclitus as playful, like a child playing with its toys, our mortal selves and our perspectives.  Parallel to this, the developmental psychologist Vygotsky, who did work in the 1930s and 40s in Soviet Russia, noticed that children narrate their world out loud to give form to their thoughts and world, and that later this speech splits into vocal speech to others and inner speech to oneself.  Heraclitus asks us to look within, and that the cosmos and our thoughts are given form through speech.


PYRRHO AND SEXTUS EMPIRICUS

Sextus is supposed to have lived sometime around 200 CE, 700 years after Heraclitus.  He is thought by scholars to have been from Alexandria in Egypt.  He might be Libyan, from North Africa, but it has been assumed that he was Greek living in Egypt or Rome.  It is thought that he was a doctor because he mentions medical cases to show how sometimes things are good but then surprisingly bad in other cases or vice versa, just like Heraclitus.

Sextus is the first Pyrrhoian Skeptic, quite similar to the Jains and Buddhists of India.  Agnosticism of all judgment and plurality of perspective and truth are staples for both.  When Alexander fought his way to the border of India, to try to conquer the rich and fertile area, he brought the philosopher Pyrrho with him around 300 BCE.  Pyrrho met with some ‘gymnosophists’ in the historian’s texts, and scholars argue whether these were Buddhists, Jains or if either existed yet in formal groups at the time.  Pyrrho witnessed the yoga and extreme penances of the sages, had discussions, then came home and refused to write anything or live in society.  People would come to visit him on the edges of town, where he would argue that everything is true and not true, that every perspective is true but also false.  His thinking sprouted a school in Alexandria Egypt, a great center of Greek, early Christian and later Muslim thought.  We know of this exclusively through the writings of Sextus.

Sextus calls upon the ‘where there is smoke, there is fire’ example used by Gautama and Aristotle, and then brings up many cases where one would be mistaken to draw the inference.  The point is not that it can’t be drawn, but it can never be certain in a particular situation.

Asian Philosophy: Buddhism in Tibet, China & Japan

Buddhism in Tibet

Tibetan culture was transformed by Buddhism, which arrived from India, Afghanistan and China shortly after 600 CE.  Mahayana Buddhism became not only Tibet’s official religion but its social structure, art and architecture as well.  The Tibetan written characters were created to translate Buddhist texts into the Tibetan language.  Many Mahayana texts, including Nagarjuna’s, survived in Tibet as Islam took over India.  Tibetans claim that Buddhism arrived centuries earlier, when the Buddha himself and other Buddhas came to Tibet to teach.  One amusing story has Buddha asking about Tibet before journeying there, and he is told that the Tibetans are the nicest people ever.  Buddha worries that if the Tibetans are so extraordinarily nice, he will lose his finely honed ability to deal with jerks, so he takes along a terrible tea servant who constantly mocks the Buddha and plays tricks on him.

Buddhism developed into many competing schools of thought in Tibet as it had in India and did in China, Japan and throughout Asia.  Tibetan Buddhism is known for its elaborate rituals, tantric practices, meditation exercises, and systems of symbols, deities and demons.  Tibetans believe that many demons were converted to Buddhism by great teachers, and so much artwork features demons who are protectors of Buddhism, its teachings and the community.  Gazing at these demons, and similarly at skull bowls of blood, decapitated heads and other horrifying images is thought to purify the self of obstructions and identify with the lowest and most horrifying levels of the self and mind.

Soon after Tibetan Buddhism was established, there was an influx of Chinese Chan (Zen, in the Japanese, which we will briefly cover today and move to koans exclusively in two weeks).  Controversy arose between those who supported the elaborate Buddhist practices and those, including many nobles, who supported the simplicity of Zen, which taught that enlightenment could be achieved suddenly and without elaborate ceremonies and practices.  Zen Buddhists do traditionally believe in deities and practice ceremonies, but meditation and enlightenment became the primary and simple focus.  Interestingly, here in the Bay Area and in America the Beatniks loved Zen and its stark black and white imagery, while Hippies, many who did embrace Zen, were drawn to the colorful and elaborately beautiful art and practices of Tibetan Buddhism and Indian Hinduism.  Legend has it that after a debate judged by the Tibetan King in 979 CE between both sides, the Chinese and their school was expelled and the King officially pronounced the Indian Nagarjuna to be affixed as patriarch of Tibetan Buddhism in opposition to Bodhidharma, the patriarch of Chan/Zen.

Between 1200 and 1500, many schools of Tibetan Buddhism arose in debate with each other over the vast store of Indian texts which survived only in Tibet.  Education in Tibetan Buddhism largely consists of the memorization of texts and debate with others about various understandings of the texts and their teachings.  Good debaters would achieve fame and following, much like athletes and celebrities today.  Many debates revolved around the controversial concepts of emptiness and buddha-nature.  As untranslated texts were being translated, schools based on the new texts (Gsar-ma) entered into debate with older schools based on the earlier translated and established texts (Rnin-ma).  

According to modern scholarship, some of both the old and the new texts were never original Indian texts at all, but were written in Tibet and “discovered” by various figures at various times.  Similar “discoveries” occurred in China and Japan with the development of Buddhism there.  New schools would arise, and a member would “discover” a text hidden in a log or a cave that just happened to support their doctrines and argue against the doctrines of competing schools.  Tibetans view Buddhism as evolving in India into the final form of Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka school, and then each Tibetan school views this tradition as evolving in Tibet into their own position.  This is very similar to Chan/Zen, each school viewing itself as the final evolution.  As mentioned, this ‘final form’ takes drastically different forms in various places.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol) has attracted a following in Europe and America, first among scholars such as the Theosophists and the psychoanalyst Karl Jung, who noted the similarities with the Egyptian Book of the Dead in his search for the primordial archetypes of the common human psyche, and later with Timothy Leary and hippies who viewed psychedelic experiences as a death and rebirth.  The text is to be read to the dying and then to the corpse in the days after death to help it be released from rebirth and achieve nirvana.  Again and again, the text implores the dead to embrace the clear light from above which appears bright and frightening to the ignorant, who prefer the dull light from below.  Embracing the clear light, which they are now ‘set face to face’ with, results in liberation, while running into the softer dim light means being reborn in the world of suffering and desire.

In a series of talks in 2010, the Dalai Lama spoke to an audience on the need for compassion and discipline across religious and secular lines, and then taught from Nagarjuna’s central texts.  We have already discussed Nagarjuna, and his importance for Tibetan Buddhism as well as Mahayana Buddhism across North East Asia.  He says that the golden age of ancient Indian should be a model of how many religions and philosophies can coexist together.  He says that he believes that only Buddhism truly believes in anatman, the absence of a permanent self, but he will ask Jain leaders about this at a Jain ceremony and series of dialogues he is going to attend in a month.  He also mentions that some Jains attend these conferences completely naked, and giggles for awhile about it.  He also mentions that religions such as Christianity and Islam which believe in heaven do believe in a permanent self, but neither he nor they know what this is for sure.  

Teaching from the Nagarjuna texts, he says that the true self has no self particular to itself at all, and that through study, critical reflection, and meditation, as we saw last time, one can come to a greater and greater realization of this deepest level of reality.  He follows Nagarjuna who criticizes the Yogachara or Mind Only school for maintaining a duality between mental conceptions and mind, saying that form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.  Rather than ridding the mind of mental conceptions, we become not only the mental conceptions but the conceptions they oppose to realize mind. Realizing interdependence means maintaining distinctions while simultaneously overcoming them.  This is the true cleansing of realization.  Just as Buddha criticized Jains for trying to get rid of the self as a conception, Nagarjuna is criticizing the Yogachara for trying to get rid of conception, including the self.  Negation of concepts is not their annihilation, but accepting the things that they negate.  Overcoming the self is not annihilation of the self, but acceptance of the other as the self through compassion.

On a final political note, Tibet is currently occupied and claimed by China.  While the Tibetan nobility did not treat the common people very well, a major factor that allowed the Communists to invade and take over, the Tibetans begged the Americans to help them and arm them against China, but American CIA agents evaluated the situation and did not see much value in protecting the vast Tibetan desert lands, allowing Tibet to fall to China.  Two years later, the world’s largest deposit of uranium was discovered in the Tibetan and Khazakstani mountains, putting this in Soviet Russian and Communist Chinese control.  If those deposits had been discovered two years earlier, it is likely that America would have protected the Tibetans and Tibet would be free today.


Buddhism in China & Japan

We will cover the Period of the Hundred Schools (600-200 BCE) and the Han unification of China (220 BCE - 200 CE) at the beginning of the second half of the class before we cover Confucianism, Moism, and Daoism.  The short story, to introduce Buddhism in China, is that many schools of thought flourished in the warring period before the Han unification of China, and that with the arrival of the Han dynasty came royal patronage and support for Confucianism and Daoism.  In the latter half of the Han dynasty, between 65 and 200 CE, the third most prominent school of Chinese thought, Buddhism, began to spread and settle in China, arriving from India and central Asia.  

The Han was a prosperous time, when there was much new money and much interest in philosophy and study and patronizing the arts and temples.  The old moneyed families, the new money families coming up, and the scholars were now competing and collaborating voices.  By the later half of the Han, there were 30,000 students at the government funded state university, where primarily Confucianism and other classic texts were studied.  

Unfortunately, Confucianism had become a new orthodoxy, and skeptical calls for revisions as well as the weakening of Han power had many scholars looking to Daoism, particularly the two main texts of the Dao De Jing and the Zhuang Zi we will study, as well as other systems such as the paradoxical Logicians and authoritarian Legalists for new solutions and understandings to old problems just as Buddhism was coming over the border.  The peasants, who were increasingly desperate, turned to Daoist religious communities of worship in large numbers and rebellions were common.  The largest were the Yellow Turban rebellions of 184 and 189 CE which sought land and food distribution for the people.  The Han triumphed and put down the rebellions, but infighting soon pulled the Han apart again once it was no longer unified against the Yellow Turbans.  This power vacuum allowed Buddhism to take hold and thrive.

Daoism offered the strongest alternative for both the elite scholars and the common devotional communities.  They centered on the ideals of a return to nature and the natural, the freedom of the community and individual from abuse of authority, and the absolute as mystical One.  Buddhism increasingly offered an alternative also in line with these ideals.  Some early Daoist tales sound much like later Buddhist koan stories.  Liu Ling, a Daoist master, was often drunk and sometimes lay around completely naked, and when several men entered his house and saw him in this state, he replied, “Heaven and earth are my dwelling, and my house is my pants...What are you all doing in my pants?”.  As uplifting as these stories were, the Daoists offered little structure for reordering society, some retreating into nature, others ignoring local tyrants or turning to religious devotion and ecstasy.

Buddhism was at first regarded as a strange foreign form of Daoism.  The two fought and supported each other alternatively for centuries afterward.  In spite of their profound similarities, centrally skepticism of human understandings and transcendence of attachment in the unification of all, Indian and Chinese language and culture had profound differences as well.  Chinese language uses short terms, while Indian language strings incredibly long and complicated terms together.  Similarly, Chinese philosophy values brevity and expresses itself in simple, concrete metaphors, while Indian philosophy values comprehensiveness and expresses itself in complex and abstract analysis.  

A comparison of Daoist and Buddhist texts shows this immediately.  Compare the metaphor of the well frog in the Zhuangzi with the middle length discourses of the Buddha on the categories of existence and how each is inherently empty.  Consider that Buddhists would refer to ‘perfection’, while Daoists would refer to being ‘round’, Buddhists would refer to ‘one’s true nature’, while Daoists would refer to ‘one’s original face’, and Buddhists would refer to ‘essence’, while Daoists would refer to ‘the pupil of the eye’.  This was the same situation when Buddhism arrived in Japan around 550 CE, Daoism and Confucianism having arrived long before.  The Japanese understood Buddhism in a Daoist natural world context.

Socially Chinese and Indian cultures were also at odds.  Chinese society was familial, seeking value in the worldly prosperity of the family.  Indian Buddhism valued the otherworldly, and advocated leaving the home in pursuit of enlightenment in the monastery.  While Daoism did have its wandering and wilderness dwelling sages, this would be a sticking point for Buddhism for many centuries.  Many competing Confucians and Daoists would routinely call for an expelling of the foreign culture that asked the young to abandon their families for the monastery.  To overcome this, Buddhists, like Daoists, offered local communities support in education, medicine, and relief in times of crisis.  Gradually, Daoism and Buddhism were interrelated, with the Buddhist Dharma  (teaching) equated with the Dao (way), and Buddhist nirvana (liberation) equated with the Daoist wu-wei (non-action).  These were crude equations, which were enriched over centuries of translation and scholarship.

Buddhist sutras continued to arrive from India, carried by both Indian and Chinese Buddhist monks on pilgrimages to spread the dharma.  In architecture, the Indian stupa became the Chinese pagoda, one of the most common and recognizable forms of Chinese architecture.  Chinese artists began portraying the Buddha and boddhisattvas in Chinese form.  The Mahayana Completion of Wisdom sutras (Prajnaparamita sutras) were introduced, becoming the central texts of the most popular forms of Buddhism today, Chinese and Japanese Pure Land Buddhism, which focus on devotional chanting to bodhsattvas for good fortune and protection.  

While Pure Land traditions were popular among common people and traditional noble families, the Chan (Chinese) or Zen (Japanese) tradition became popular among scholars and nobles who pursued philosophy, literature and the arts.  The Pure Land tradition feeds off the faith practices of the Tiantai school, and the Chan/Zen feeds off the wisdom tradition of the Huayan school.  Both teach the oneness of all things, but the Tiantai would say there are demons in the heavens and buddhas in the hells, while the Huayan say that One is All and All is One.  Next week, we will exclusively study the Chan/Zen literature and the koan stories, some of my favorite philosophy texts.  The history of Buddhism in Korea and Japan is also dominated by the duality of the Pure Land devotional traditions and the Chan/Zen meditation and koan practice.  

In Japan, Amida (from the Indian Amitabha) worship reached a radical and popular form that bears interesting resemblances to Protestant Christianity.  Shinran (1173-1262) founded one of the most popular forms of Japanese Buddhism, Jodoshinshu, which taught that other than the most dedicated sages human beings are too sinful to gain enlightenment, so the best way for all people to gain entrance to higher existence, in accord with the Mahayana tradition, was to rely entirely on the grace and power of Amida who could bring both the good and the bad to heavenly realms or pure lands.  It is only in turning away from self accomplishment and entirely towards the salvation of all by grace that the most people could be saved from hell worlds.  Shinran decided that no vow of celibacy would make much difference, and so he married and taught his priests to marry, for which he was persecuted for the rest of his life.

As texts arrived and were translated, the Chinese noticed that the Theravada and Mahayana had two different ideas of how one achieves enlightenment already mentioned.  The Theravada teach that progress is gradual, much like the Confucians do, and that it is only study within the institution that brings slow and steady progress.  The Mahayana teach that buddha-nature is already within, and that sudden breakthroughs and transcendent states are achievable by anyone, much like the Daoists do, and that this can occur either inside or outside of the institution.  This dual understanding became complimentary but also developed into a conflict, the central conflict of the two schools of Chan/Zen and later a conflict within Neo-Daoism and Neo-Confucianism which had both subsumed much of Buddhism in later centuries.

All of this resulted in a vast expansion of Buddhism, among common devotional worshipers who sought refuge in new divinities, practices and communities, among scholars who found new philosophical concepts and texts to study and re-read, and among the wealthy who gave immense amounts for new temples, monasteries and monuments with new designs and appeal to secure their own fortune not only with the deities but with the populace.  Daoist priests and Buddhist priests alike served communities and noble families, providing relief for the suffering of both the poor through charity and the rich through consolation.  Buddhist organizations funded hospitals, low cost hostels for travelers, bridges, and trees planted beside popular roads.

Unfortunately, this allowed many Buddhist monasteries to become extraordinarily wealthy, which attracted unwanted attention from competing systems and rulers who were wary of rivals.  It was not lost on the ruling powers that Buddhism, like Daoism, served as a popular center of power that could, and sometimes did, result in rebellion.  Mahayana Buddhism in particular had teachings that could be interpreted as supporting rebellion, especially by those in the suffering countryside.  In the last age, when the buddha Maitreya was expected foretold by signs, no government was legitimate and the world was soon to be reformed and reborn.  Many rebellions used the color white, the color associated with Maitreya, as a symbol for their movements.

In some periods, Buddhism or Daoism was persecuted depending on patronage, while in other periods each received vast contributions and thrived.  This is entirely similar to Catholic monasteries in Europe, who not only fought amongst themselves (Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits) after becoming wealthy civic centers of education, medicine and technology, but had to survive persecution of rulers who wanted their wealth as well.  In later dynasties, after Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism were the three established schools of Chinese thought and were interwoven in official rituals and popular culture, rulers worked hard to work with Buddhist leadership, who had considerable sway over much of the population, while also making sure that they did not acquire too much unchecked power.

Around 1100 CE, Neo-Confucianism attempted to revive Confucianism to return it to its central place in society.  While Zhu Xi, the greatest teacher of Neo-Confucianism, saw Buddhism as the enemy, he could not help but reincorporate Buddhist teachings such as the metaphors of the sun behind the clouds and the pearl at the bottom of the muddy pond, each implying that through study, as well as meditation, the inner truth and nature can be realized.  While originally the term ‘li’ meant human order and tradition, in Neo-Confucianism Li became cosmic order, more like the Dharma of Buddhism and Dao of Daoism after being intertwined with Buddhism over centuries.  While Confucius taught that one should benefit one’s own family as well as humankind, Neo-Confucians taught that one should benefit all conscious beings like Mahayana boddhisattvas.  Wang Yang Ming (1472-1529 CE), one of the greatest Neo-Confucians who we will study, was called a Buddhist in disguise by his opponents for teaching Buddhist metaphors that were part of popular culture and sudden achievement of new understanding.  Neo-Confucianism supported state funded hospitals, orphanages, homes for the elderly, and public cemeteries.  

In the last two centuries, as China encountered Europeans, there were new favorable and unfavorable interpretations of Buddhism used to understand China’s relationship with the new foreigners.  Some attempted to show that there was nothing new in European thought that could not be found in Buddhism, such as rationalism, humanism, democracy, dialectic, evolution, and later communism and existentialism.  Others argued that Indian Buddhism and its transcendent visions had held China back such that it had not modernized as fast as Europe.  Later, Chinese communists such as Mao would both condemn Buddhism as superstition of a past age as well as celebrate it as a common bond with Asia that transcended nationalism and demonstrated that Asia and the world could one day share a common culture.

One final modern figure to mention is Nishida Kitaro (1870-1966), a Japanese philosopher and Zen practitioner who founded an entire school of philosophy in Japan by comparing Zen and the Buddhist tradition to German philosophy, particularly the existentialism of Nietzsche and Heidegger.  In his book The Self Overcoming of Nihilism, he argues that German and French existentialists have a preoccupation with the emptiness of existence as a negative, meaningless and frightening thing, and that Buddhism and Zen have gone beyond this to affirm the positive abundance and richness of the emptiness and void.

Greek Philosophy: Parmenides, Zeno & the Eleatic School

Parmenides (510 - 450 BCE) was born in Elea, a Greek colony on the southern coast of what is today Italy, near Croton, the place Pythagoras set up shop.  Parmenides became known as the founder of the Eleatic School, and Zeno and Melissus, who we will cover next, were the school’s second and third famous philosophers.  Born from a wealthy family, Parmenides became known as an excellent orator and legislator.  He was known for leading an admirable life, and the phrase ‘a Parmenidean life’ was known to later Greeks as a noble existence of simplicity, morals and discipline.

Xenophanes may or may not have taught Parmenides, but either way he was clearly a major influence.  We saw in studying Xenophanes that there are potential problems in his thought, as he claims the One, monotheistic being, does not move but shakes and causes all things by its thought.  Parmenides seems to be trying to resolve these problems, but to do so he enters into different yet equally paradoxical waters.

Diogenes Laertius says Parmenides was taught by a Pythagorean named Ameinias.  Parmenides seems to agree completely with Pythagoras’ account of the universe, but strangely believes this is mere mortal opinion and illusion, how reality appears to us but not the whole truth of how it actually and fully is.  Parmenides even states that males are conceived in the right part of the uterus, and females from the left, following the paired oppositions of the Pythagoreans.

Parmenides had a large influence on Plato.  Plato revered Parmenides, in his dialog The Sophist calls him ‘Our father Parmenides’.  In Plato’s early dialogues, Socrates sounds very much like Heraclitus, questioning whether human beings can ever be said to truly know anything.  In the middle and late dialogues, Socrates begins pursuing the true and the good, giving it order and shape.  Modern scholars are in general agreement that Plato increasingly placed Parmenides over Heraclitus, dividing the cosmos into the infinite above and the mortal below.  The forms of things, the eternal models from which all things come, are unchanging and infinite, and so knowledge of these can be absolute and true.  Plato follows Parmenides in dividing truth and knowledge from appearance and opinion.

Like Heraclitus, we only have the opening and fragments of Parmenides’ only work, On Nature, a work of poetry like that of Xenophanes.  In it, an unnamed goddess instructs the narrator, Parmenides himself, who journeys from darkness to light (“leaving the house of night for the light”) accompanied by daughters of the sun in a chariot.  The daughters pull back their veils from their heads, a gesture likely standing for enlightenment and revealing.  

The word ‘apocalypse’ comes from ancient Greek for ‘revealing’.  While Christianity, with its origins partly in Greek philosophy, has associated the word with the end of the world, this would merely be the final apocalypse, any great revealing of truth being an apocalypse and thus a wide variety of ‘apocalyptic literature’.  Parmenides’ On Nature is an example of this ancient genre.  The ascent into the heavens to acquire knowledge and descent into the world and/or underworld to know the false and wrong is a theme common in ancient cultures including the Homeric Greek myths.  Parmenides is being converted and initiated into the mysteries, found in mystery cults like that of Pythagoras.  The cosmos contains secrets that only revealed to the few who make the journey.

For Parmenides, there are two roads, one day and the other night, with gates and doors in the sky.  Strangely, this means that as Parmenides ascends into the sky, he leaves the house of night below, only to find the doors, the destinations of the roads of day and night, to be up in the sky.  Justice, the goddess Dike, holds the keys to the two doors.  She is said to be ‘avenging’, implying that she allows the good through the door of day and pushes the bad through the door of night based on merit.  The daughters of the sun convince Dike to open the doors with soothing words, and the chariot presumably flies through the door of day to meet with ‘the goddess’, either Dike or some other unnamed divinity.  

Parmenides, departing from Homer and Hesiod, says that this goddess (possibly Dike) governs all things, and that of all the gods she created Love first, likely Aphrodite.  She explains that though there is no reliance on the opinions of mortals, but that opinions and appearances are a part of the larger whole which can be found on the road of and through the door of day, the light.  The goddess says that Parmenides must learn the persuasive truth, far above the common ‘beaten path’ of humanity.  This implies that various opinions, contradicting philosophical positions, are not persuasive as the one common truth is (a position identical with Heraclitus).

Parmenides argues that because we speak and think about something, something must exist as opposed to nothing.  Thought is likened to the limbs of a body, and the unity behind the thought in an individual mind is the same unity for everyone and the cosmos itself.  This means that the oneness of a particular being (say, a frog), the conception of it as a particular being (our concept of the frog), our conception of ourselves as having perceptions and conceptions of the being, and the unity of the cosmos are all one and the same unity, misunderstood/misthought by the mind to be here at a certain time and there at another.

The way of truth is described, and differentiated from the way of appearance/opinion.  Again, this is identical to Plato’s separation of knowledge, which must be unchanging, from opinion, which is partial, relative and mortal.  The way of night and day are distinguished as that which is and that which is not, two approaches.  Parmenides suggests that thought, when fallen and foolish, takes things apart and makes them different for us in thinking they are different, obscuring the unity of things in the One that is whole reality.  In naming things, ‘marking’ them, we are the ones who separate and unify our reality, obscuring or revealing the great unity as much as we can.

The lower way is quite identifiable as the position of Heraclitus, in which all things change and so there is only perspective and relative truth.  Parmenides sounds exactly like Heraclitus in condemning his position, arguing those who say that being and nonbeing are the same and are not the same, and who say that the road of all things turns back on itself, are deaf and blind wanderers.  Recall that Heraclitus said the road forward is the road back, and day and night are one.  Parmenides sees Heraclitus as a common sleeper, incapable of distinguishing between day and night and thus in darkness, while Heraclitus would say Parmenides is a foolish expert who thinks he knows the complete and unchanging truth, who thinks he can separate day from night, and is thus in darkness.  Most scholars today accept that Parmenides is writing this in direct response and opposition to the work of Heraclitus.

Parmenides argues that which permanently IS must be eternal and unborn, just like Xenophanes says about his infinite god that is being, and also the same as Heraclitus says of the cosmic fire that gives rise to all things.  Because change and becoming involve nonbeing, as Heraclitus argues, being cannot involve any change as being does not admit any nonbeing.  While Heraclitus says there is only one unchanging thing, the supreme One cosmic fire, as opposed to the many particular beings that change, Parmenides argues that because there is only one unchanging thing, including all particular things, all particularity and change is an illusion.

Nothing comes from nothing, Parmenides argues.  “Ex nihilo, nihil fit”, in the latin, from which we get the phrase ‘ex nihilo’, out of nothing or nowhere.  All nonbeing, including divisions and differences between things, does not exist.  While later Neoplatonists would say that there are many types of nonbeing which exist as not-being in particular ways, Parmenides is rather saying that all types of nonbeing do not exist at all, are illusions given to us by our thoughts.

Some have identified this ‘out of nothing, nothing comes’ with the later law of conservation of energy , that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.  Some philosophers of science like Feyerabend have pointed out that versions of big bang theory of modern physics violate this principle, and that something coming from nothing is not seen anywhere nor duplicatable in a laboratory and therefore scientifically unverifiable.

Unlike physicists, Parmenides argues that all motion, all change, is illusion and false.  Time is an illusion, an idea found in some Indian thought.  Parmenides argues that if things are moving, then they must move into nothingness or void, participating with it, and because nothingness does not exist this is impossible.  Parmenides returns to the same two arguments, first that being cannot be involved with nonbeing, and second that nonbeing can not be.  Heraclitus could argue that categorical nothingness does not exist (and indeed we have not found any absolute vacuums or voids), but relative being and nonbeing do exist and commingle.  For Heraclitus, this is true insight, whereas for Parmenides this mixture is a confusion and illusion of thought.

Parmenides says that in truth, “Coming to being is extinguished, and destruction unknown”.

The cosmos does not think or speak, but its awareness is its thinking all things statically.  While the same can be said of its speech, its order, another paradox emerges.  If the One is undivided and without differentiation, what order is there?  There can be no true order other than indivisible and uncharacterizable unity, like the infinite of Xenophanes.


Thought and being are the same, and one must think and say for things to be.  For Parmenides, any separation of things into particulars is an injection of nonbeing into being, a corruption via thought of the original form and order.  Additionally, human thoughts and concepts are temporary and changing, and so being itself can not be said or thought.  In this, Parmenides is in complete agreement with Heraclitus.  Both believe that reality is a superior One, which is above human comprehension.  Heraclitus also allows for it to be unchanging insofar as it is the continuous change of all.  Heraclitus and Parmenides are both said to be influenced, if not taught directly, by Xenophanes.  To resolve the paradox of Xenophanes’ infinite, Heraclitus says that the stability is consistent instability of things, the unchanging is the constant changing of things, while Parmenides says that the changing of things and the multiplicity of things is an illusion.

The One is a continuous thing, is indivisible, and does not have parts or differences in itself.  This again is identical to Xenophanes, but Parmenides extends this to all particular things, saying that their particularity and differentiation is illusion.  He compares being to a sphere, without parts and continuous along its surface.  Some have argued Parmenides believed being to be spherical in shape, others that he is arguing being is without shape of any kind and he is merely using the sphere as a metaphor.

Remember that Heraclitus was the first to use the term ‘Logos’ for the order of the cosmos, identifying it with speech.  For Parmenides, we can’t know truth through perception, but only by Logos, by order itself, though Parmenides, like Xenophanes, is committing himself to saying that the One does not move or actively order as that would be change and difference.

The duality between what is and what is mere appearance is similar to the Pythagorean’ Y, the forked paths.  Like Heraclitus, Parmenides says the truth and knowledge is aetherial light, identifiable with the higher elements, and untruth and opinion is darkness.  Similarly, the road to permanence is separate from the road to destruction.  Both Pythagoras and Parmenides apply this to individual human conduct and the physics of the cosmos.

Parmenides seems to agree with Anaxagoras’ and Pythagoras’ description of the formation of the cosmos and how it came to be by separation of the elements, which is strange as he believes this not to exist.  Scholars agree that Parmenides’ goddess describes Pythagorean cosmology and then says that this is the opinions of mere mortals.  Thus, Pythagoras is completely correct about what the cosmos looks like to human beings, which is wrong and an illusion.  Like an optical illusion, we all misperceive things the same way.

Zoroastrians believed that Ahriman, the evil spirit or God, polluted the world in the beginning, known as ‘the lie’ and ‘the drug’, in Persian ‘druj’, from which we get our word ‘drug’.  Like Heraclitus, Parmenides shares a decently monotheistic cosmos with the Zoroastrians, and identifies order with the Logos even though the cosmos can not move or speak the way that mortals do.

Parmenides’ claim that all change is illusion and unreal is known to modern scholarship as ‘The Eleatic Challenge’.  Philosophers responded with their own answers, showing that Parmenides was influential but also controversial.  Human thought is always both agreement and disagreement, just as Heraclitus says that arguing against each other we agree, and singing together we compete.

Democritus and the atomists, who we will study soon, tried to resolve the paradox with unchanging atoms that do not change themselves and are eternal but recombine to make the changing things we perceive.  Once again, the unchanging is just beyond our perception even if it is within our comprehension.

Einstein believed in ‘block time’, that while we perceive time as moving that all of time already exists as a static whole.  The philosopher of science Popper, who taught the more skeptical Feyerabend, called Einstein ‘Parmenides’ as an insult for holding this view.  Einstein was a determinist, saying, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe”.  Later chaos theorists criticized Einstein as not enough of a relativist, not believing enough in relativity, as Einstein argued that time and space are relative but not necessity and chance, as necessity is absolute and chance is an illusion.  Chaos theorists argued that necessity and chance, like time and space, are also relative, a relativist position much like Heraclitus and unlike Parmenides.


Zeno (490 - 430 BCE), also known as Zeno of Elea, is the most famous and influential of the Eleatic school after Parmenides.  In Plato’s dialogue Parmenides, a major source for the life and thought of Parmenides and Zeno, Plato says Parmenides was 65 and Zeno 40 when the two visited Athens to spread their teachings, and Socrates is very young.  Plato says Zeno was good looking and loved by Parmenides, which many believe meant that the two had a physical relationship that does not disturb Plato or Socrates in the slightest.

Aristotle says Zeno invented dialectic, reasoning back and forth from both sides to find the truth.  Assuming the principle of noncontradiction, which Aristotle endorses, if one side contains a contradiction, you can eliminate it.  This is also known as ‘reductio ad absurdum’, reduction to absurdity.  To eliminate a position, we would start, “Suppose you are right, and X is Y...but this leads to a contradiction, so we know that X can not be Y”.  However, Zeno used dialectic differently, as he assumed all human arguments and concepts contain contradictions.  This is similar to the goddess of Parmenides arguing for Pythagoras’ view and then saying that it is illusion.  For Parmenides and Zeno, as well as Heraclitus, all human concepts are incapable of grasping the truth in itself, apart from anything.

Diogenes Laertius wrote that Zeno was very skilled at arguing all sides of a position, and that he was imprisoned and killed by King Demylus of Elea, possibly for arguing against his position.  Plutarch, the Roman historian, wrote that Zeno tried to kill Demylus, and when he failed and was captured, he bit off his own tongue and spit it in Demylus’ face, killing himself.

While none of Zeno’s writings have survived, he is famous for his paradoxes, discussed by Aristotle and many others.  There were supposedly forty arguments that resulted in contradictions, but only nine survive today found in the writings of others, and some seem to be alternate versions of the same arguments.  While some have thought that Zeno’s paradoxes are meant to show that reality is paradoxical, Zeno intended his arguments to show that human beings are incapable of knowing true reality with human thought, and that any attempt to know the whole or a part of the whole results in contradictions.  Thus, while things seem to clearly move in front of our eyes, when we try to argue how they move our thinking becomes entangled in contradiction and paradox.  Remember that Xenophanes said no one will know the truth of the things about which he speaks, the One and the supreme order of reality.  If true, this means that Zeno was not trying to eliminate one side of a dialectic, but show that all sides of an argument result in contradictions as no differentiated human argument or conception can be the supreme undifferentiated unity itself.

While mathematicians have supplied further conceptions to make sense of Zeno’s paradoxes, there is still no general agreement on the paradoxes, how they can be resolved or even if they are indeed paradoxes and genuine examples of contradiction.

For the his paradox of nonbeing, Zeno argues if being is many and not one, then being contains nonbeing and what is alike is not alike, which is impossible, as the similar cannot be different and the different cannot be similar.  This is entirely in line with Parmenides and antithetical to Heraclitus.  If being is absolute, not relative, then nonbeing cannot exist at all, in any form or to any degree.  Thus the paradox: nonbeing seems quite real, but cannot really be.

For his paradox of place, Zeno argues if things have a place, then a thing’s place has a place, and this place has a place, ad infinitum.  This would be true of Anaxagoras’ infinite cosmos, unlike Hesiod’s cosmos in which it takes an anvil nine days to fall from the height of the heavens to the earth.  Because this results in an infinite regress, we have a paradox: finite places are not infinite, but there can’t be a finite place without an infinite regress.

Zeno’s most famous paradox is the paradox or impossibility of motion, which Aristotle attacks extensively in his Physics.  There are three versions of this argument that are nearly identical: the Tortoise and Achilles, the dichotomy argument, and the arrow in flight.  

In the Tortoise and Achilles version, Zeno argues that the quickest runner cannot overtake the slowest given a head start, as there are an infinite number of points to cross and this leads to an infinite regress.  Say that a tortoise is given a ten meter head start, and Achilles attempts to catch up.  First Achilles must reach the point from which the tortoise started, to find that the tortoise has gained a bit of ground.  Then Achilles must reach this next point, only to find that the tortoise continues to crawl ahead.  There seem to be an infinite number of points ahead of Achilles that he must cross, as each point reached spawns a new point of destination.  Therefore, though we all know Achilles can catch the tortoise, it seems that he must cross an infinite number of points to do it.

The dichotomy argument works similarly, but with one mover moving towards a fixed position.  To get to the destination, the mover must cross half the distance, then cross half the remaining distance, and again and again until the destination is reached, which seems impossible given that there is a never-ending set, an infinite regress, of half-segments to be crossed.  The path is finite and infinite at the same time, which cannot be.

For the ‘arrow in flight’ argument, Zeno argues that at each point along an arrow’s path, the arrow is not moving, as it occupies a single space in a moment of time.  This means that the arrow, as it moves, is unmoving at each point.  Because a thing cannot move and stay unmoving at once, all motion is impossible.

Neoplatonists were concerned with the infinite, the finite and the problems of the two being involved with each other.  Nicholas of Cusa, a medieval German Neoplatonist, argued that we can conceive of the infinite, and thus our mind must be in some way infinite itself.  He uses the example of a mustard seed, asking us to imagine an infinite supply of earth, water and light for it to grow.  Clearly having the parable of Jesus in mind, Nicholas argues that a single mortal mustard seed would multiply endlessly in these conditions, giving us a real physical infinite regress in both the growth of the seed and our comprehension that this growth is infinite.

The later German philosopher Hegel, who is well aware of the work of Parmenides, Zeno and the Neoplatonists, argued that the infinite was present as the finite, using the image of a circle as unending.  Similar work with the infinite of the German mathematician Cantor drove him temporarily insane and he was committed to an asylum after discovering his famous Cantor Set.  If you imagine a line that splits into two segments in the middle again and again in each part, after an infinite number of splits you would have twice that, twice as infinite, number of sections.

If our reality is infinite, not having a beginning or end, that would mean that everything is infinite but some infinite is more or less relative to other parts, which is how things move at particular speeds.  Consider two treadmills, one running twice as fast as the other, but both moving without cease.  While both eventually result in an infinite amount of motion, one moves twice as much as the other, such that one infinite is twice another infinite.  From the perspective of the slower treadmill, even if both moved at infinite speeds, imperceivable to us, while it stays immobile the faster treadmill moves at a constant and finite speed.

Consider the arrow in flight of Zeno’s motion paradox.  The space the arrow must cross is infinite insofar as it is infinitely divisible.  To cross any space is to cross an infinite distance, which is not impossible if the motion is itself infinite, but greater relative to the space.  The quicker the arrow crosses the space, the greater it is relative to the space.  Aristotle argued that as the space between the tortoise and Achilles, between the arrow and its target, gets smaller and smaller, the time it takes to cross each division of space gets smaller and smaller.

There is also Diogenes, who we will study, who had his own refutation.  After hearing of Zeno’s arguments against motion, he stood up and walked a short distance.  This is similar to Samuel Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley’s idealism.  Berkeley (for whom our town is named) believed that reality is in the mind and the world is a dream in the mind of God, our own existences being dreams within the dream.  Johnson, walking from church with a friend speaking to him of Berkeley’s thought, kicked a rock and said, “I refute it thus!”.  Zeno would reply to both that motion and material seem quite real, but these demonstrations only underscore how argument for the everyday is strangely impossible.

Quantum theorists have recalled Zeno’s paradox of motion in conjunction with the wave-particle paradox, calling it the ‘quantum Zeno effect’, that observation seems to change how reality behaves, either as a unified wave or disunified number of particles whether or not the system is observed.  Similarly, if we observe the infinite divisibility of a space, it seems impossible to cross, but only if we consider it’s infinite divisibility, which seems to disappear as soon as we cease to consider it as part of the problem.

Similarly, fractal geometry suggests that the organic patterns we see everywhere in the cosmos, as well as our human bodies, result from an infinite number of permutations.  Mandelbrot, while working at IBM, found that he could create patterns that imitate nature by letting simple math games reiterate a practically infinite number of times.  The Mandelbrot Set, the overarching pattern of these patterns, is now famous, and there are many websites and youtube videos exploring the endless complexity of the Mandelbrot Set.

Lewis Carroll was fascinated by Zeno’s Achilles and Tortoise, created a dialogue between the two in which the Tortoise, speaking as Zeno, always outsmarts Achilles leading him into paradoxes and infinite regresses.  In Hofstadter’s book Godel, Escher, Bach, he considers Zeno’s paradoxes, recreating Lewis Carroll’s dialogue in terms of modern cognitivist science and fractal geometry.

Borges, the argentinian writer famous for his Ficciones, his short works of surreal fiction, was fascinated by Zeno, and often used infinite regresses.  In one of his tory of the Library, an unending library with every possible book, including exact copies with one mistaken letter.



Melissus (500 BCE) was from the island of Samos, the birthplace of Pythagoras.  Not much is known about his life.  He may or may not have been a direct student of Parmenides.  One source says he commanded a naval fleet from Samos that supposedly defeated the Athenian fleet led by the Athenian general Pericles in 441 BCE.

Melissus wrote arguments supporting Parmenides and the Eleatic school, like Zeno.  He was a major source of Eleatic philosophy for later philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, though they considered his work to be inferior to that of Parmenides.  Melissus, in departing somewhat from Parmenides, also became an influence on later atomists we will study.

Melissus argues that the cosmos, all of being, is eternal, infinite, indivisible, and unchanging.  Unlike Parmenides, though difficult to discern, Melissus argued that being is eternal but not timeless, not a single static moment.  Being does not change or move, but it extends into the past and into the future endlessly.  Also, Melissus argues that the One is spatially unlimited, without explicitly saying that distance and difference is illusion.  If Melissus is arguing against time being an illusion, his position is quite similar to Xenophanes, but this would bring Melissus back from the problems of Parmenides’ position to the previous problems of Xenophanes’ position.  If the One, which is all, does not move, then how do things move in time?  If the One is indivisible, then how is it omnipresent in unlimited space?

As some ancient sources have suggested, Melissus may be arguing that the unity of the cosmos, the oneness of the One, is eternal, infinite, indivisible and unchanging but this does not make the many finite, divisible and changing things of the cosmos illusion.  

In an early Buddhist text, the Questions of King Milinda (Milinda Panha), a Buddhist missionary is questioned by the king of a greek trading colony in Northwest India.  Many of these colonies existed for centuries, and were sites of exchange between Greek, Persian and Indian culture, including Greek influence on early Buddhist stone carved statues.  The missionary and the king enter into a philosophical debate, both well versed in various schools of thought.  

Using the metaphor of a chariot, shared by earlier Indian thought and Plato alike, the missionary asks the king if the chariot is really its wheels, or any of its parts, or if it is the unity of the parts aside from the parts themselves, to each of which the king replies ‘no’.  The missionary says that this is true for the cosmos and the teachings of the Buddha, and the king is pleased with the answer.  The missionary, in accord with Buddhist thought, argues that reality is one, and that the oneness of reality is not found in a particular part (omnipresent and characterless) and that it is not found exclusively in the unity distinct from the parts.  The oneness is not mere oneness distinct from the many, but a oneness that is the unity of oneness and manyness, what medieval European Neoplatonists called ‘hyper-ousia’, a super One that can not even be characterized as unity in opposition to anything, not even multiplicity.

Melissus similarly argues that the One that is reality is all oneness and manyness, that it contains all characterization without opposition and so has no character, a ‘having-no-character’ which is ‘having-all-character’.  Exclusively, the One is nothing.  Inclusively, the One is everything.  This approaches the position of Xenophanes and Heraclitus (who was mistaken for the Buddha by some scholars).  While the One does not change, this is an encompassing of all change, not a denial of change as illusion.

Melissus argues that the One is full, not empty, and that it remains full without change.  This fullness can include all change, in an unchanging fashion.  He says the One has no parts, no thickness, and no body.  That which includes all parts, all spans of width and all bodies does not itself have distinct parts, has no distinct width and no distinct body.  Reality is not characteristically blue, or three inches thick, or has thirteen parts, or is found particularly in the American Southwest.  Melissus, as an Eleatic, is strangely Heraclitean in his attempt to resolve the thinking of Parmenides.