All is Revealed

PERFECTION OF BEING

"It is both necessary to say and think that being is: for to be is possible, and nothingness is not possible." (Fr 6)

"And on this there are signs in plenty that, being, it is ungenerated and indestructible, whole, of one kind and unwavering and complete." The Way of Truth quoted in Simplicius' Commentary on the Physics 144

This is the essence of Parmenides' argument. Being must be ungenerated and incorruptible. It can't be generated because in that case it would have to form from nothing, an impossibility. Likewise it can not pass to nothingness, for there is no such thing. Hence it has no past and no future, but lives in an eternal present or now. It is unmoved, absolutely unchanging. It is complete and perfect.

"Parmenides had another argument, one based on dichotomy, which purports to show that what exists is one thing only and, moreover, partless and indivisible. For were it divisible, he says, let it have been cut in two - then each of its parts in two. Since this goes on forever, it is clear, he says that some final magnitudes will remain which are minimal and atomic and infinite in number, so that the whole thing will be constituted from infinitely many minima; or else it will disappear and be dissolved into nothing , and so constituted from nothing."

(Porphyry quoted in Simplicius Commentary on Physics 139)