溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
The Way of the Senses or the Way of Truth — Which Is Real?
Between the shifting world of the senses and the changeless truth of reason, which is what truly is?
The one way: that it is, and that it cannot not be.
The moment Parmenides placed reason above the senses, a great fork in Western philosophy began. His pupil Zeno defended him with the paradoxes of the arrow and the tortoise, trying to prove motion rationally impossible. On the other side Heraclitus countered that all things flow, that change itself is the real; the clash of the two led to Plato's synthesis, dividing the changeless Forms (Parmenides's side) from the flowing world of sense (Heraclitus's side) into two tiers. The question — is reason right, or the senses? — later blazed up again as the two-thousand-year quarrel of rationalism and empiricism.
Whenever numbers and models diverge from intuition and we must decide what to trust, this oldest fork of epistemology opens again.
Parmenides, speaking through a goddess, sets two ways apart: the way of truth, that what is, is and what is not, is not; and the way of opinion, following the senses, that things both are and are not.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Parmenides, speaking through a goddess, sets two ways apart: the way of truth, that what is, is and what is not, is not; and the way of opinion, following the senses, that things both are and are not. He held that the coming-to-be and passing-away the senses show us are, under reason's scrutiny, contradictions. I cannot accept all of his conclusion. But the question — which to trust when the eye and the reasoning head disagree — I too meet again each time.
✍️Your Answer
The lineage of the ancients ends here. Now it is your turn before the question. There is no right answer — only how you, today, would answer.
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