| MORE THOUGHTS ON THE PARMENIDEAN 'THE ONE' |
| (or do visual universals exist?) |
Why did Parmenides, the greatest Pre-Socratic
philosopher of all time, understand the simplicity
of the concept of *being* as *The One* (to on - that which is) whilst later Plato prefered
to struggle on in the metaphysical
mire of
believing that *nothing* (to mae on - that which is not ) actually exists?
In the original Greek the two ways are simply
named "that Is" (hopos estin) and "that not-Is" (hos ouk estin) (Frag. 2. 3 and 2. 5) without the "it"
inserted in our English translation. In ancient
Greek, which, like many languages in the
world, does not always require the presence
of a subject for a verb, "is" functions as a grammatically complete sentence
[1](wikipedia)
The tradition rightly
characterises Parmenides' ontology as claiming
that the every-day perception of reality
of the physical world is mistaken, and that
the reality of the world is 'One Being' which is an unchanging, ungenerated, indestructible whole.
Moreover he argued that movement was impossible because it requires moving
into "the void", and Parmenides
identified "the void" with nothing,
and therefore (by virtue of the eliminativist
definition) it does not exist. That which
does exist is *The One* which is timeless, uniform, and unchanging:
Obviously referring to some imagined *
ultimate indivisible particulates of matter* or the building blocks of *that which is* or *the basic stuff of the cosmos* as if anticipating Einstein over two thousand
years later Parmenides writes:
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How could what is perish? How could it have
come to be? For if it came into being, it
is not; nor is it if ever it is going to
be. Thus coming into being is extinguished,
and destruction unknown. Nor was [it] once,
nor will [it] be, since [it] is, now, all
together, / One, continuous; for what coming-to-be
of it will you seek? / In what way, whence,
did [it] grow? Neither from what-is-not shall
I allow / You to say or think; for it is
not to be said or thought / That [it] is
not. And what need could have impelled it
to grow / Later or sooner, if it began from
nothing? Thus [it] must either be completely
or not at all. [What exists] is now, all
at once, one and continuous... Nor is it
divisible, since it is all alike; nor is
there any more or less of it in one place
which might prevent it from holding together,
but all is full of what is. And it is all
one to me / Where I am to begin; for I shall
return there again. Under 'way of seeming', Parmenides set out a contrasting but more
conventional view of the world, thereby becoming
an early exponent of the duality of appearance
and reality. For him and his pupils the phenomena
of movement and change are simply appearances of a static, eternal
reality.
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Parmenides' rejection of 'movement' and 'change' as simply 'appearances' of a static, eternal reality only falls
short of the ontology of modern eliminativism
in the sense that whilst *movement* and *change* are undoubtably non-existent mere appearances,
what does exist of course is the moving, changing, objects that make up the macro-holon that is the One Being'.
Parmenides was simply aware of the same
sensorial switching or toggling of wholes and sub-wholes on the various level
of a hierarchy that we are sensing , when we look at a pile
of coal or sand as a collection of objects
laid on top of each other at one moment,
then switch over in the next moment to seeing
it as a single holism.[2] (Panarchy. 2007)
 Take a shovel of sand and lift it from the
heap. Look! There on the shovel is
a lesser
holon, re-positioned in the ontological
holarchic
series of ordered groupings of people
or
things within a system.
A human organism can be regarded as a multi-levelled
two-way [up-down] deterministic pecking order of semi-autonomous
sub-wholes, forking into sub-wholes of a
lower [usually smaller] order.
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 The idea of the "holon" was introduced
by Arthur Koestler in "The Ghost in
the Machine" (1967) and was presented
again at the Alpbach Symposium (1968) in
a paper titled: "Beyond Atomism and
Holism - the concept of the holon".
The "holon" represents a very interesting
way to overcome the dichotomy between parts
and wholes and to account for both the self-assertive
and the integrative tendencies
of an organism. [3] (ibid)
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Of course although evrybody else in the
world was and still remains aware of this,
Plato was not like every body else and preferred
to be the odd man out.
I have written elswhere of our perceptive
‘toggling’ or ‘sensorial switching’ between two modes of seeing the starry
sky above. We see but a fraction of our ‘home’
galaxy - a giant revolving gaseous disc which
consists of about 200 billion stars, and
in one observational sweep of our eyes take
in the heavens as comprising of an uncountable
glittering myriad of individual stars.
Then, suddenly, spontaneously, even as our
eyes wander from one bright glint to another,
a stochiastic event occurs which is difficult
to control (although some degree of constraint
over the random variability of the sequence
can be acquired.)
The complexity of 'multiples of singular individuation' blurs. Suddenly we see the apparent immensity
as the huge, crowded silver integration we
call the Milky Way, the four spiral arms of predominantly blue,
reasonably young stars between a million
and ten billion years old.
Parmenides realised what we now understand
is the obvious - that the cosmos can be thought
of in two ways - as a collection of individual items, or
as a whole. That a football crowd can be seen as a
mass of conglomerate humanity, or as each
man picked out as singular individual face
in the crowd.
What Plato failed to grasp was this. From
a mereological point of view the Milky Way
or a rain-cloud can qualify as an 'object. '
Not to allow this perceptual modality as
Plato did is to demand that each individual
be given a name and a roll-call of individuals
enumerated to describe a crowd. Human bodies
are composed of trillions of single cells
which (relativistically) are separated at
similar yawning distances from each other
as the stars in the sky.
So what was Plato up to after rejecting
Parmenides assertion of *the One?*
Why, he set about trying to prove that *nothing*
exists! The Platonic attempt at an instantiation
of the non-existent heteron ('the other') can be seen to be initiated in the following
dialogue:
Eleatic Stranger:
Strange! I should think so. See how, by
his reciprocation of opposites, the many-headed
Sophist has compelled us, quite against our
will, to admit the existence of not-being.’
Theaetetus:
Yes, indeed, I see.
Interpreted this means: the negation of
the one being does not lead to nothing, i.
e. no being at all, but to the other. The
‘other’ as opposite is the 'to mae on' of the one.
Rendered into modern language this means:
‘If there is not ‘something’ in the fridge
– there must be ‘nothing’ in the fridge,’
so that means there is something else in
there called ‘nothing.’
Of course any modern school child of the
age of ten or under would retort that there
is ALWAYS something in the fridge – oxygen gas.
For Heidegger expert Michael Eldred though:
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This is ‘one of Plato's most important discoveries
-- how otherness enables a non-being to 'be'
in a certain way, namely, as the opposite
('antithesis') of something else (e. g. ’the
ugly’ as the non-being of the beautiful).’
[4] (Eldred. 2007)
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‘
But no, we do NOT see! This is an ontological
red herring. If as Heidegger rightly claims;
'Being' does not exist’ it disposes of the Platonic
notion of the reciprocation and instantiation
of opposites, for if 'being' does not exist - its opposite 'heteron' or ‘other’ of *to mae on* or non-being cannot either.
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Plato shows via the idea of 'heteron', i.
e. of the 'other' and 'otherness,' that ’otherness’
is a FACET OF BEING which allows the one
being to be different from the other non-being
and automatically enables the 'to mae on'
to exist. ‘Plato therefore sets out to analyse
the 'logos' to show how otherness and therefore
falsehood is possible within it. Thus it
seems the logos can be both truth and lies
– every 'logos' is a 'logos ‘ ti peri tinos'
-- every speaking is saying something about
something even if it is a lie, blasphemy
or a foolish error.[5] (Eldred. 2007)
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‘
(1) Can the three dimensional cellular objects
that make up our human bodies be thought
of as true objects? Yes, of course they can.
(2) Can our human bodies, composed as they
are of countless smaller objects, be counted
as objects? Yes, of course they can.
(3) Are our visual experiences of *holons*
different to our perception of 'raindrops
on a car windscreen,' or paint spilled on
a pavement – that is as patterns of light
and dark or the re-bounded light-waves of
colour as they impact the retina and are
decoded by the brain? No - they are different.
One HAS to draw the ontological line in
the sand somewhere which is exactly what
Parmenides did
If the Milky Way (like the human body,
or a heap of sand) is classed as a
macro-holeronic object made up
of 200 billion smaller stellar objects and their
countless planets and satelites, to
say nothing of the multitudinous other similarly
dispersed smaller denisons of the cosmic
plenum, then the Milky Way can be usefully
defined as a 'integrative entity,' the ontic opposite of the reificational
instantiation - the 'fictionally useful linguistic entity' - the notorious 'universals' like *love* and *freedom* posing as objects, but in reality being nothing
more than the result of the self-referential perceptual
conventions of human ideation?
References:
[1} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmenides
[2] Eldred. Michael. http://heidegger.an-archos.com/archive/
[3] Koestler. Arthur . 'Some General Properties Of Self-Regulating
Open Hierarchic Order' (Soho) (1969) Panarchy, 2001-2007 http://www.panarchy.org/koestler/holon.1969.html
[4] Eldred. Michael. http://heidegger.an-archos.com/archive/
[5] Ibid.
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Evans Experientialism 
