The Greek philosopher-sage Parmenides — born in 514 BC — proposed what he referred to as “Being” as a kind of unitary ontological ground that, to my ear, seems more-or-less equivalent to the “Tao” of Taoism and the “Dharmakaya” of Buddhism and the “Brahman” of Hinduism and the “Pure Awareness” of Advaita Vedanta. In the following poem, translated by Francis Lucille, Parmenides describes the doctrine or “path” of Being, and argues for its superiority over what presumably was a competing view of the time, namely that “being is not, therefore nonbeing is.”
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Two paths are open to investigation.
The first says: being is and nonbeing is not.
It is the path of certainty, because it follows the truth.
The other says: being is not, therefore nonbeing is.
This misdirected path, I tell you, cannot lead to a sound conviction
For, if this statement were true, it would not be possible for you
to conceive of nonbeing, nor to name it.
And nonbeing is not. I invite you to reflect deeply on this point,
And to move away, in your search, from that other path
As from the one traveled by those ignorant mortals
Who are the men of two minds: the uncertainty which resides in their hearts
Misleads their wavering reason. They are swept along,
Deaf and blind, benighted, the masses without discernment
Who pretend that being and nonbeing are simultaneously identical
And different, they for whom, for any statement, the opposite is equally true.
So direct your thinking away from this path of exploration.
May habit, so often resumed, not force you to return to it,
With eyes blinded, ears filled with noise
And mouth with words, and may your intelligence alone resolve this contentious issue.
Being is. And countless signs prove
That being is free from birth and death
Because it is complete, immutable and eternal.
It never was, it never will be, because it is completely whole in the now,
One, endless. What beginning, indeed, should we attribute to it?
Whence would it evolve? Whither?
I will not allow you to say or to think that it comes from nothingness,
Nor that being is not. What exigency would have brought it forth
Later or earlier, from nonbeing?
Thus, it can only be, absolutely, or not at all.
Our firm innermost conviction will never admit
That something can spring forth from nothingness.
In this way the goddess of Justice, forbidding birth and death,
Preserves without respite the existence of being. Whereas the question was to resolve
Whether being is or is not. We must therefore decide to abandon as false
The second hypothesis, the path which can neither be thought nor formulated,
And to hold to the first, which is the path of the truth.
How could what is, one day cease to be? How could it have, one day, come to be?
What is born, is not, neither what is to be born.
Thus dies birth and thus dies death.
Within being there remain no differences because it is completely identical to itself.
There is not, here, something more that comes to break continuity
Neither, there, something less: but everything is filled with being.
Thus it is all continuous: being adjoined to being.
On the other hand, maintained motionless by powerful links,
It is without beginning and without end, since birth and death
Have been rejected as contrary to our intuition of truth.
Remaining itself, existing within itself, supported by itself,
Thus, immutable, it remains in the same place because the powerful necessity,
Hemming it in from all sides, keeps it firmly unified.
That is why it is not permitted that being be unfinished,
Because there is nothing missing in it; unfinished, it would be missing everything!
Thought is identical to being, and so it is for the object to which thought refers;
Thus there is nothing, and there will never be anything, outside of being
Which Destiny compels to an eternal bliss. Thus,
To be born and to die, to be or not to be,
To change place or appearance,
All of these events are but names superimposed by man’s ignorance.
Being the ultimate, it is everywhere complete.
Just as an harmoniously round sphere
Departs equally at all points from its center.
Nothing can be added to it here nor taken away from it there.
What is not, cannot interrupt it’s homogeneous existence.
What is, cannot possess it more or less. Out of all reach,
Everywhere identical to itself, beyond all limits, it is.
* * * * * * * * *
All Things Are One
The scholar Albino Nolletti — who has written a book titled What Is Parmenides’ Being (which, unfortunately for us non-Italian speakers, is available only in Italian) — summarizes Parmenides’ vision as: “All things are one, and this one is Being.” He goes on to articulate the all-encompassing scope of this Being, in terms of western philosophical categories, thusly:
Parmenides’ Being is therefore the unitary physical substance of the world and at the same time the logical concept of “existing.” In his absolutely unitary “vision” Parmenides theorizes an entity that is simultaneously (1) physical-cosmological: it is all that exists in the cosmos, and then the cosmos itself; (2) metaphysical: it is the invisible substance “behind” all individual apparent things that we perceive every day, constituting and permeating them; (3) ontological: it is the only existing being, is “what is”; (4) logical-conceptual: since it is the only existing body, it is the only object of thought …
Now, admitting at the outset that (1) I don’t speak or read the Greek language, so can’t comment authoritatively on the translation as such; and (2) I lack in-depth familiarity with the history of Greek philosophy, so don’t have a clear sense of the intellectual milieu within which Parmenides theory was created and presented — still I’d like to explore certain facets of Parmenides’ poem, as translated above. In particular, I’ll be asking the question: In what ways is the word “Being” useful as a pointer to a non-phenomenal “dimension” of experience, and in what ways is it not so useful or potentially confusing?
Apples & Oranges
Thus,
To be born and to die, to be or not to be,
To change place or appearance,
All of these events are but names superimposed by man’s ignorance.
When I first read this, it surprised me — because it seemed quite at odds with the earlier (and quite strongly affirmed) statement that “Being is, and not-being is not.” So which is it, I wondered: (1) that “Being is, and not-being is not” — or (2) that “to be or not to be … are but names superimposed by man’s ignorance”?
Or perhaps both are true, at different “levels of reality” so to speak? Or maybe Parmenides is articulating a process of deepening insight — stages along a path? Or perhaps the “Being and not-being” of the earlier phrase, and the “to be or not to be” of the latter phrase are using the word “be” in two distinct ways, with different referents?
In an effort to (hopefully) sort this out, let’s review how language (at least the English language) tends to work — which is in terms of explicit or implied pairs of opposites. In short: words have conceptual meaning only in relation to what they are not. So for instance, say there are six pieces of fruit in a fruit-basket. To three of them I assign the name/label “orange,” and to the other three I assign the name/label “apple.”
I assign these labels based upon the characteristics of the perceived object. When I decide to name the round orange-colored object an “orange” — automatically this divides the conceptual/linguistic/phenomenal universe into “oranges” and “not-oranges.” It would take a long time, but if we wished we could at least begin the project of specifying each and every “not-orange” object. In light of our current example, we could start by observing that an orange is not an apple, i.e. “apple” is a subset of “not-oranges.” And so on, ad infinitum (?) …. an orange is not a peach; an orange is not an elephant; an orange is not a smile; an orange is not a spaceship, etc.
The point is that my certainty in naming something as an “orange” depends intimately upon all that is “not-orange.” At a conceptual/linguistic level, words have meaning only in relation to their opposites, i.e. to what they are not. It’s like the heads and tails of a coin; or the inhalation and exhalation of the breath. Though at any given moment, one may (and perhaps necessarily) appear without the other — in any larger context they are mutually dependent: we can’t have one without the other hovering somewhere in the background.
And so it is, also, with the word “being” — which, at a conceptual/linguistic level, is meaningful only in relation to its opposite, “non-being.” The same is true for the word “something” — which is meaningful only in relation to its opposite, “nothing.”
When words function as referents to gross or subtle phenomena — to objects in the external world or the internal world of the mind — they are meaningful only in relation to what they exclude, what they are not. But what about words whose referent is not a phenomena, not a gross or subtle object identifiable through its unique phenomenal characteristics — but rather a non-phenomenal homogeneous dimension that is the true “substance” of all phenomena?
The Tao That Can Be Spoken …
As the Taoist sage Laozi famously said: “The Tao that can be spoken, is not the eternal Tao.” Skillfully employed, the word “Tao” can point to a non-conceptual “space” beyond all language. While this space is no-thing — i.e. is not a specific phenomena with characteristics that distinguish it from other phenomena — it also is not nothing. It is not a nihilistic void which, as Parmenides points out, couldn’t possibly be experienced — for if you or I were there to experience such a nihilistic void, it would no longer be a nihilistic void, but rather be “full” (to some degree at least) or our awareness of it.
Now presumably Parmenides is using the word “Being” — through most of the poem — in a way that is akin to how Taoists use the word “Tao.” It is intended as a pointer to a non-conceptual dimension that is ontologically prior to language. And this is fair enough. Theoretically, any word at all can serve this function — and ultimately all of them do. But in the interim, certain words may have an advantage over others, may be relatively less likely to fail in the attempt to direct attention away from phenomena and toward a non-phenomenal realm.
Let’s consider once again the statement: “Being is and nonbeing is not.” And now, since we’ve established that “Being” is basically equivalent, in its function, to “Tao,” let’s replace the former with the latter in our statement, which gives us: “Tao is and non-Tao is not.” Do these two sentences feel the same? Do they seem equally true or untrue? Or how about: “Brahman is and non-Brahman is not.”
While the words “Tao” and “Brahman” were designed specifically to point to an ultimate dimension of reality, the word “being” has a much wider range of functions, and its association with “existence” opens the door to all variety of ambiguity. To my ear, “non-Tao” is nonsensical — it just doesn’t compute, unless we’re speaking of “Tao” as a more relative-world path, and “non-Tao” then being something like the Buddhist “adharmic” i.e. not in alignment with deepest truth/wisdom.
In the Hindu tradition, ultimate “being” or “existence” are generally articulated in union with consciousness and joy/bliss — as sat-cit-ananda. In this way, ultimate “being” or “existence” is clearly distinguished, at a linguistic level, from phenomenal names and forms: nama-rupa. Unfortunately, in the English language we don’t really have a way of linguistically distinguishing ultimate being/existence from phenomenal being/existence (aka appearances) — except perhaps via the convention of capitalizing the former, and leaving the latter lower-case. And for this reason, using the word “Being” to point to a non-phenomenal dimension is always going to be a bit tricky.
Spherical
Parmenides uses the metaphor of a sphere to describe the non-phenomenal attributes of Being. In the same way that the center of a sphere is equidistant to all points on its surface, Being equally pervades all phenomena. In the same way that a sphere has no corners, no ragged edges, Being is utterly homogeneous and smoothly indistinguishable from all phenomena. Just as a sphere is harmoniously complete, so is Being. And just as the ratio of the circumference of a sphere to its diameter remains constant, regardless of the size of the sphere; so it is that the relationship between phenomena and their true substance remains unchanging, regardless of relative frames of reference.
While phenomenal appearances — from the point of view of a relative observer — come and go, at a deeper level nothing ever really happens — though our concepts may temporary veil this truth. Hence the sense in which “to be or not to be” is not the question:
Thus,
To be born and to die, to be or not to be,
To change place or appearance,
All of these events are but names superimposed by man’s ignorance.
In this passage, “to be” or “not to be” refer to the appearance of phenomena within a space-time context. In particular, the appearance of a coherently functioning human body is called “birth” and the disappearance of a coherently functioning human body is called “death.” And as words/concepts, “birth” has meaning only in relation to “death.” But all such events are merely waves upon the ocean (or points within the sphere) of Being.
So to recap: when used as a nondual pointer, the word “Being” — like the word “Tao” or “Dharmakaya” — does not have a phenomenal referent, and so requires no linguistic/conceptual opposite in order to function as a pointer. What it points to is no-thing in the sense of “not a perceptual/cognitive object with space-time characteristics” — but this no-thing is not a nihilistic void.
Now it seems worth mentioning that certain mathematical entities also don’t have actual referents — for instance imaginary numbers, which can’t be found on a number-line (yet still function in useful ways) — but that’s a topic for a future post …
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