Zeno Of Elea Quotes

if being is many, it must be both like and unlike, and this is impossible, for neither can the like be unlike, nor the unlike like

Zeno of Elea has dismissed all such difficulties by introducing another; he declares that nothing exists.

Maybe even more important than the D.B.P. [Divine Brotherhood of Pythagoras], ∞-wise is the protomystic Parmenides of Elea (c.515-? BCE), not only because of his distinction between the 'Way of Truth' and 'Way of Seeing' framed the terms of Greek metaphysics and (again) influenced Plato, but because Parmenides' #1 student and defender was the aforementioned Zeno, the most fiendishly clever and upsetting philosopher ever (who can be seen actually kicking Socrates' ass, argumentatively speaking, in Plato's Parmenides).

Zeno of Elea, who belonged to the same philosophical school as Parmenides, formulated a famous paradox designed to show that motion is impossible. After an arrow shot at a target has got halfway there, it still has half the distance to go. When it has gone half that distance, it still has half of the way to go. This goes on forever. The arrow can never reach the target, so motion is impossible. In normal physics, with a notion of time, Zeno's paradox is readily resolved. However, in my timeless view the paradox is resurrected, but the arrow never reaches the target for a more basic reason: the arrow in the bow is not the arrow in the target.

Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt—particularly to doubt one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms. Who knows how these cherished beliefs became certainties with us, and whether some secret wish did not furtively beget them, clothing desire in the dress of thought? There is no real philosophy until the mind turns round and examines itself. Gnothi seauton, said Socrates: Know thyself. There had been philosophers before him, of course: strong men like Thales and Heraclitus, subtle men like Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, seers like Pythagoras and Empedocles; but for the most part they had been physical philosophers; they had sought for the physis or nature of external things, the laws and constituents of the material and measurable world. That is very good, said Socrates; but there is an infinitely worthier subject for philosophers than all these trees and stones, and even all those stars; there is the mind of man. What is man, and what can he become? So he went about prying into the human soul, uncovering assumptions and questioning certainties. If men discoursed too readily of justice, he asked them, quietly, tò tí?—what is it? What do you mean by these abstract words with which you so easily settle the problems of life and death? What do you mean by honor, virtue, morality, patriotism? What do you mean by yourself? It was with such moral and psychological questions that Socrates loved to deal. Some

I have been speaking about liberal studies. Yet look at the amount of useless and superfluous matter to be found in the philosophers. Even they have descended to the level of drawing distinctions between the uses of different syllables and discussing the proper meanings of prepositions and conjunctions. They have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies – with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives. Listen and let me show you the sorry consequences to which subtlety carried too far can lead, and what an enemy it is to truth. Protagoras declares that it is possible to argue either side of any question with equal force, even the question whether or not one can equally argue either side of any question! Nausiphanes declares that of the things which appear to us to exist, none exists any more than it does not exist. Parmenides declares that of all these phenomena none exists except the whole. Zeno of Elea has dismissed all such difficulties by introducing another; he declares that nothing exists. The Pyrrhonean, Megarian, Eretrian and Academic schools pursue more or less similar lines; the last named have introduced a new branch of knowledge, non-knowledge.

What is most striking is not so much that Parmenides and Zeno were wrong as that they did not bother to explain why, if motion is impossible, things appear to move. Indeed, none of the early Greeks from Thales to Plato, in either Miletus or Abdera or Elea or Athens, ever took it on themselves to explain in detail how their theories about ultimate reality accounted for the appearances of things.

Metamorphoses by 'Death Posture' (by 'Zeno of Elea') Powers of visualization, self-discipline and concentration are the qualities necessary. All magical practice, to be effective, needs great courage. By means of the Death Posture, total transportation of consciousness into the sex-centre occurs. This brings about pure aesthesis and the creation of a new sexuality by autotelic concept: the subsequent ecstasy is a sublimation. Because every other sense is brought to nullity by sex-intoxication, it is called the 'Death Posture'. Everything is 'a priori' to the act. The 'a posteriori' illumination reveals the inter-sexual correspondences of all things, and great emotiveness becomes... My desires have made a sentient soul, an obsession, a vampire, an insatiable negress of pendulous breasts and fatted thighs riding me into the abysses of the quadriga sexualis...

Foreigners like Zeno—who laid out what would be recognized for thousands of years as the three basic domains of philosophy: logic, ethics, and physics—arrived in Athens from Italy’s Elea carrying the seeds of an intellectual sport for thrill-seeking underexcitables, those whose perpetually parched limbic systems thirsted for neural thrills. Zeno’s contribution was the mental rough-and-tumble Aristotle called the dialectic. Socrates gave this gift a local twist and presented it as his own “Socratic method,” within whose social confines a variety of convention piercers found abode.

If the things that are are many, that then they must be both like and unlike, but this is impossible. For neither can unlike things be like, nor like things unlike.

I need not recall the arguments of Zeno of Elea. They all involve the confusion of movement with the space covered, or at least the conviction that one can treat movement as one treats space, divide it without taking account of its articulations. Achilles, they say, will never overtake the tortoise he is pursuing, for when he arrives at the point where the tortoise was the latter will have had time to go further, and so on indefinitely. Philosophers have refuted this argument in numerous ways, and ways so different that each of these refutations deprives the others of the right to be considered definitive. There would have been, nevertheless, a very simple means of making short work of the difficulty: that would have been to question Achilles. For since Achilles finally catches up to the tortoise and even passes it, he must know better than anyone else how he goes about it. The ancient philosopher who demonstrated the possibility of movement by walking was right: his only mistake was to make the gesture without adding a commentary. Suppose then we ask Achilles to comment on his race: here, doubtless, is what he will answer: “Zeno insists that I go from the point where I am to the point the tortoise has left, from that point to the next point it has left, etc., etc.; that is his procedure for making me run. But I go about it otherwise. I take a first step, then a second, and so on: finally, after a certain number of steps, I take a last one by which I skip ahead of the tortoise. I thus accomplish a series of indivisible acts. My course is the series of these acts. You can distinguish its parts by the number of steps it involves. But you have not the right to disarticulate it according to another law, or to suppose it articulated in another way. To proceed as Zeno does is to admit that the race can be arbitrarily broken up like the space which has been covered; it is to believe that the passage is in reality applied to the trajectory; it is making movement and immobility coincide and consequently confusing one with the other.

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature. —Zeno of Elea (490–430 B.C., Greek philosopher)

[...], the individuals in antiquity were freer, because their aims were nearer and easier to achieve. Modern man, on the other hand, is crossed everywhere by infinity, like swift-footed Achilles in the parable of Zeno of Elea: infinity impedes him, he cannot even overtake the tortoise.

Why didn’t the chicken cross the road? According to the ancient philosopher and logician Zeno of Elea (c. 495–c. 430 BC), the bird simply found it impossible to get to the other side.