The Goddess Who Told Him Change Is an Illusion

Parmenides chose an unusual form for philosophy that would ordinarily be argued in prose: a poem in dactylic hexameter, the meter of epic verse, describing a young man carried by chariot beyond the gates of night and day to meet an unnamed goddess who reveals to him the difference between the Way of Truth and the deceptive Way of Opinion that mortals mistake for knowledge. What the goddess tells him is that only what is can be spoken or thought of at all, that what is not cannot even be conceived, and that it follows from this that what is cannot have come into being, since it would have had to arise from what is not, cannot pass away for the same reason, cannot be divided into separate parts, and cannot change, since change would mean something that is becoming something it currently is not. The ordinary world of birth, decay, motion, and plurality that the senses report is, on this argument, not a reliable guide to what really is at all. That conclusion forced every Greek philosopher who came after him to answer it somehow: the atomists posited indivisible unchanging atoms moving through void to preserve a Parmenidean bedrock beneath apparent change, and Plato's theory of unchanging Forms behind the changing world of appearances answers the same challenge in a different register. His student Zeno of Elea defended the same one-ness with paradoxes about motion, including the famous case of Achilles unable to overtake a tortoise, that remain live problems in the philosophy of mathematics today.