2.4 Parmenides and Oneness
Away from observations and physical cosmology, Parmenides (in the late 6th or early 5th century BC) was the first philosopher to question the nature of existence itself, challenging the previous theories and establishing the “Eleatic School” of philosophers who employed a method of axiomatic deductive arguments to justify their views that realty is one unchanging entity, and that multiplicity, motion and change are deceptive phenomena. Some of his famous successors in this metaphysical doctrine include: Zeno, Melissus and Xenophanes.
In his single renowned work, a poem called “On Nature”, survived only in fragmentary form, Parmenides described his dual view of reality: “the Way of Truth” and “the Way of Opinion”. In the first view, he explained that reality is one and unchanging, and existence is timeless and uniform, unlike what we normally observe in the world of appearances where our sensory faculties lead to conceptions which are false and deceitful, hence the second view. This led Democritus (460-370 BC) and other physicists to propose the atomic theory of matter, to contradict these arguments.
Parmenides attempted to distinguish between the reality of the unity of nature and its unreal variety or multiplicity. He had immense influence on Plato, who named a dialog after his name, and always spoke of him with veneration. In effect, Parmenides’ monistic views were deeply characterized in the whole history of Western philosophy, and he is often seen as its grandfather. In “Nature and the Greeks”, Erwin Schroedinger identified Parmenides’ monad of “the Way of Truth” as being the conscious self Schrödinger (2014), which was an important part of the development of Quantum Mechanics according to some interpretations, as we shall describe in chapter III.
However, Parmenides was not able to convince other prominent philosophers, such as Socrates and Aristotle, so his student Zeno tried again by reformulating the same argument in terms of what to become known as Zeno’s paradoxes, that can be considered the first thought experiments in which he demonstrated the deficiency of both the discretuum and continuum views. As we shall discuss his paradoxes in section 5, Zeno basically showed that both views will inevitably lead to infinity problems, which was in fact the main motivation that eventually lead to the development of calculus by both Newton and Leibniz (see also sections 16 and 14.
As we have also explained in a previous book Haj Yousef (2017), there exists some remarkable correspondence between the metaphysical views of Parmenides and Ibn al-Arabi. Parmenides’ philosophy of monism, together with the complex and rigorous adaptation of his hypotheses in Plato’s Parmenides, constantly elaborated by the later Neo-Platonists (as will be reviewed in section 6), offer even closer analogies to Ibn al-Arabi’s overall ontological system, especially what came to be called later as the oneness of being, that led to the Single Monad Model of the Cosmos. One of the main principles of this eccentric cosmological model is the “Re-creation Principle” which postulates that the cosmos is being re-created every instance of time by the Single Monad, which alone may be described by real continuous existence, while everything else are various forms, or temporal imagery monads, brought into existence by this Single Monad that takes only one form at a time. Despite the apparent undeniable multiplicity of monads or forms, their existence ceases in the second instance after their becoming, and is perpetually replaced by other, usually analogous, forms. Therefore, Duality of Time, that results from the Single Monad Model, can be thought of as a mathematical formulation of the Ibn al-Arabi’s Oneness of Being, which is essentially the same as Parmenides’ monism that he expressed through his dual view of existence.
Our knowledge of Parmenides’ philosophy, however, proceeded mainly from the existing fragments of his poem, in addition to later commentaries and interpretations by some of his students and critics, including Zeno, Plato and Aristotle. If we have access to his original teachings, which may have been mostly oral, he would surely have explained to us how the false and deceitful multiplicity emerged from the unity of nature. The same can be said regarding Zeno’s lost book of paradoxes (that will be discussed in section 5).
Fortunately, however, we do have access to the most important works of Ibn al-Arabi, spanning hundreds of books and tens of thousands of pages, even in their original forms, in his own hand writing, in addition to the various extensive interpretations offered by his direct followers and close students. Nevertheless, Ibn al-Arabi’s outstanding philosophy has not been yet given the required attention, mainly because of the difficult symbolic language he habitually used, in addition to the fact that he intentionally scattered his controversial conceptions over his many works and in different contexts within his magnum opus, the Meccan Revelations, and other shorter books and treatises.
For this reason, we want in the following to explain further the paradoxes of Zeno, and show that they can not be resolved without the framework of Ibn al-Arabi’s Single Monad Model, that is actually in full correspondence with monistic doctrine of Zeno and his teacher Parmenides. More detailed discussion can be found in the chapter entitled: “Zeno’s Paradoxes and the Reality of Motion According to Ibn al-Arabi’s Single Monad Model of the Cosmos” of the previous cited book Haj Yousef (2017).