According to Parmenides, we must ever affirm that Being Is.  This simple affirmation has perplexed, befuddled and stimulated thoughtful people for two and a half thousand years.  Can we look at this assertion about Being in a new way?

 

To begin, what concept of Being do I have that would require an affirmation, a testimonial of faith?  My concept of Being is my model of both myself as a being, as well as my model of others as beings and of the totality of everything I believe actually exists and is carrying on somehow.  But how do I know that I have got it right about the Being of myself, others and everything?

 

There is also the problem of subject and object.  Does my being have being in the same sense that a table or a cloud or an angel or a UFO has being?  What would I even actually mean by the concept of “same sense”?  I do believe that I exist, just as I believe that my house exists, but I can always move to another house yet I cannot move to another self because it would be myself who is moving, which cancels the move as a move.  My being remains my being, just as your being remains your being.  As pure subjects, we may lose our present body and even our present personal mind and yet reincarnate and rementate again and again.  Objects, including bodies and minds, can change, but the subject, the Self, has permanent Being or it cannot be called a sheer point of self-existence as a being that is a self.  So it is only in myself as a self that I have access to permanent, absolute Being.  Through objects, bodies and minds I have only an indirect and relative access to Being, for such things have their changeful and temporal share in Being for the-time-being, meaning for as long as they subsist in being until they disappear, dissolve and lose their being.

 

Whatever I may be as will be somehow completely uncovered at some future date will alone make possible an accurate and fully real affirmation that Being Is.  In the Hindu Vedanta this will be the moment when I the Self, the Divine Spirit, get revealed directly to and within myself that I am Being, as well as Awareness and Bliss.

 

Did Parmenides believe he was perceiving an impossibly spherical but absolute massive supreme Object that is The Being that Is?  What then did he consider his own self as a “seer of being” to be?  What is the being of a being who affirms an absolute but objective being?  And what is the status of being of an intellectual affirmation, conclusion, belief or faith?  What did he believe he was gaining for himself and all of us with his assertion that “Being Is”?  According to his Divine Guru, the Goddess Alethyia or Uncoveredness (Truth), we are to gain freedom from all appearances, illusions or merely humanly constructed models of Reality.  What then is Being without a mental model or conceptual construct of “Being”?  Would not the right affirmation rather be something like, “There is a mysterious,   absolute ontological reality or being that we cannot verify or assert until we have it directly and purely uncovered in our own being beyond all mental models or mere beliefs about it?”  How else can we get at the real truth of Being without a premature affirmation that “Being Is”?

 

Parmenides does not just raise to us the Question of Being, but the Question of Reality as well, for “Being” and “Is” are a compound dualistic issue.  And when he asserts that thinking is being, he creates an equation of cognition equals reality, indirectly confirming that we always arrive at mental constructs that we try to believe are “reality”.  In the present world of constructivist philosophy, the Parmenides assertion that “thinking or cognition is Being itself” would be taken as an ultimate tongue-in-cheek statement, a real teaser that we take our latest model of “reality” all too seriously.  But we also know that he perhaps took his model of reality as a grand-finite-sphere-containing-everybody-and-everything a little too seriously.  Maybe he had an intuition of the Monad of Leibnitz, in which case he was looking at a reflection of his own being as a self when seen in the mirror of intellect or reason.

 

Being and Reality are being tossed back and forth in our consciousness because of the gap that exists between subjective being and objective being with subjective being closer to the true Question-of-Being and objective being closer to the Question-of-Reality.  This would then imply that Reality is Objective Being and Being is Subjective Reality.  Therefore, I am being and objectivity is reality, which would land us in the Buddhist concept that Being is not Reality, that being is voidness or nothingness.  Being is a self, a subject and therefore not a “thing” or object, hence a no-thing.  Permanent being as self would then perhaps be the Absolute thing or Monad, but a nothing in the realm of impermanent objects or “things”.  I am eternal whereas everything is fleeting.  Self-nature is voidness and the realm of totality of all bodies and organizations of matter is objective ever-changing reality in the sense of real estate or material properties that are scientifically measurable.

 

Parmenides was not the beginning of ontology, but the premature ending of it as a dogmatic ontogony that needs to be deconstructed and reconstructed again and again within each philosophical questioner as an ultimate ontological learning process.  We must leap into an ever more true re-beginning of the twin questions of being and reality.  The intellect is an instrument for ever learning and re-learning, questioning and re-questioning in service to our Being as an ever more aware being.  The performance of philosophical thinking is not there to be ended as a final conclusion.  No final conclusion can be permanent because it has only the relative being of the intellect and not the absolute being of the Self who employs the intellect.  Hence any Cartesian identification of self or “I am” with cognition or “I think” is doomed to fail because it confuses the subjectivity of the Being of a self with the objectivity of having an intellect or organ of reason.

 

It was Martin Heidegger who pointed out for the first time in Western philosophy that the ontological issue of our own self as being is not going to go away in spite of two-and-a-half thousand years of dogmatic ontological blindness.  He also showed that our merely “ontic” experiences of ourselves as social minds or physical bodies as objects-in-the-world will not stand up to genuine ontological scrutiny.  Therefore, what began with Heidegger must not end with Heidegger in spite of the decreasing interest in philosophy in the Western world.  Existential issues of ontology of being-a-self are burning like a long fuse on the timeline leading to that final explosion of ourself-in-the-world that we call our death when our body dies.  The meaning of Being needs to be personally resolved or we are hardly worthy of considering ourselves authentic, truly individual human beings as opposed to being mere collective social units of the common herd who are rich or poor, strong or weak, famous or unknown, influential or unheeded.  Our social status in the everyday world means nothing in comparison to our philosophical status in the uncanny world of Being.