Please Parmenides, be a bit more clear!

As Nietzsche paints him, Parmenides is the pessimistic  step-ancestor of Descartes. By that, of course, I’m referring to cogito ergo sum, the now-commercialized catchphrase of Descartes and a foundational idea in Parmenides thought. For Parmenides, empirical evidence is useless; that which is empirical is gathered through observation (i.e., our senses), and the senses cannot be trusted to provide any true insight into that which exists. 

Say what you want, you're not going to convince a dog that leftovers don't exist. Perhaps keener canine senses are all the more deceiving.

 

 

So, it would seem that our senses trap us in a proverbial hall of mirrors, unable to make heads or tails of reality and far too confused to know which direction grants escape from the illusion. How then, you may ask, can we know anything if not through the use of our senses? After all, empirical evidence is the stuff science is built on, and that junk seems pretty real to me (until you start getting into some of the freakier theoretical physics). Logic, that oddball among all other philosophy classes, makes a valiant rescue. Parmenides claims that it is only through logical inference that the truth of matters can be discovered, and indeed the foundation for that (as far as I could make out from Nietzsche, anyway) is thought. To be honest, I missed the part where Parmenides made sense of why thought is trustworthy when information gathered from the senses is not (yeah, Parmenides, at least Descartes made his reasoning on that matter semi-clear). For the sake of moving the conversation forward, I’m just going to let him have that one and assume that I legitimately missed something in the text. If any of my humble readers would be so kind as to explain this to me, I’d greatly appreciate it.

What can be gathered more clearly from Parmenides thought, though, is the common denominator for all of the Pre-Socratics thus far: the concept of the one. That which-is is whole, unmoving, unchanging and eternal, with no beginning and no end. That which-is is the one, and constitutes all (the only singular thing) that actually exists. Anything that has passed away or come into being fits squarely in the other camp, that which-is-not; this includes, of course, human beings, who (last time I checked) are generally quite fond of the notion that they exist.

Now, some confessions, and a few questions I’d like to ask of anyone who happens upon this page with a deeper philosophical understanding than my own. I must admit at this point a deficiency in my certainty of Parmenides’ philosophy; these are the conclusions that I came to as I understood his philosophy, so any additional helpful perspectives you have would be welcomed. As far as I could discern, there was no proof given for Parmenides’ existence, and only the statement of thought being part of that which-is alludes to this possibility. From his perspective, is there any logical evidence that other humans exist? Is there any logical evidence that HE exists? If not, then what exactly are we (other than non-existent, because that really clears nothing up)? To say that we are phantasms of another person’s senses assumes that other people exist to be deceived by their senses. I also see little point in articulating a philosophy for non-existent people to read and understand their non-existence. It seems there are some pretty fundamental questions here that need answering in order for his philosophy to be moderately cohesive.