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Parmenides and Zeno

Zeno of Elea was an ancient philosopher who lived even beforeSocrates and Plato. Zeno's teacher was named Parmenides, who

believed and taught that the universe is one, and that its contentsare unlimited. Parmenides, at the age of sixty five, is said to havemet a young Socrates in Athens.

Throughout history there have been many philosophers who havebelieved in the limitlessness of space, however, Parmenidesuniquely taught that time is infinite, without beginning, end, ormiddle.

Parmenides believed everything must exist, which meant to him

that change was an optical illusion of some kind. Since both pastand future already exist, he argued that the passing of time must beunreal. And so Parmenides denied change, saying it was appearanceonly, and interestingly out of the same principle taught thatexistence or being is ultimately a oneness. Existence could not becreated and was indestructible. He may have been the first westernphilosopher to describe the universe as a permanent single whole,rather than a product of many parts.

This radical ideology did of course lead other philosophers to look

for inconsistencies in Parmenides philosophy of monism andtimelessness, especially since pluralism and change in everyday lifeare so much more evident than oneness. Zeno most notablyresponded by vigorously defending his teacher Parmenides withingenious arguments about space and time.

Zeno's most popular paradox was meant to show that change isimpossible, because space is infinitely divisible. To explain, imaginewe take an orange and hold it about waist high from a hard floor.Now we drop the orange. Unless we are in outer space, the orange

will fall and smack the ground, coming to rest in contact with thefloor. But why is the orange able to move through space if space isinfinitely divisible.

Lets try it again, but this time as we drop the orange mentally wedivide the distance to the ground in half, and keeping hold of theorange, we move it half way to the floor. Now we divide the

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remaining distance to the floor in half again and move the orangethat distance. Then we do the same thing again, and again as manytimes as we can, always dividing the distance in half.

We could, if we were perfectly accurate, continue to do this over and

again, since hypothetically we can always divide the remainingdistance in half no matter how small the distance to the floorbecomes. The orange should never hit the floor when dropped, thespeed of the orange being irrelevant. Space can be divided in halfan infinite number of times, and so the orange must travel aninfinite distance, simply to move at all.

If we drop the orange it does hit the floor, but as we try to bridgethe gap between the upraised orange and the floor using linear timeand space within our minds, we end up trapped within an infinity ofmoves and an innumerable group of infinitely small points. In fact, ifboth time and space is linear the orange should not move even aninch away from where it is upraised, because the first inch theorange tries to move also can be divided infinitely. And the firstmillimeter can be divided infinitely. Thus if time is linear and soinfinitely divisible, the way space is infinitely divisible, the orangewould never be able to move at all, no matter what force impaled it.

It appears from Zeno's paradox that either time or space must not

be linear and so not be infinitely divisible, that is, in order for ouruniverse to change. But instead of concluding that what weexperience as time or space is broken, Zeno simply argued thatthose moments were not numerable, but infinite, and so ultimatelywere one whole. Zeno believed any other view would divide theworld into numerable parts.

Zeno's argument is twofold. First he believed that if there areseparate worlds, then we should be able to say how many actuallyexist. So he took the next step and argued the many worlds of an

infinite universe are actually one single undivided world that neverchanges.

Where Zeno and Parmenides both advocate a single reality ofoneness, not inconsistent with what Giordano Bruno believed, bothintuitively define the universe as the whole of what is possible, orthe one reality view. The philosophers who recorded their belief in

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many worlds consistently described one reality, which should be ofno surprise, since those who are or were agnostic would not try todefine the ultimate universe as Bruno and the others attempted.Zeno could not explain why we observe the world to change, or whyit did so consistently with a good deal of orderliness, and so the viewof an undivided oneness, taught by Xenophanes, and Parmenides atthe school of Elea in Italy, did not become the prominent view oftheir time, but Zeno's paradoxes that explore the infinite are stillconsidered unsolved puzzles in modern times.

Find out more about timelessness at:

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