Parmenides, the East, and the Question of Illusion

Across cultures and millennia, human thought has struggled with the same enigma: if Being is eternal, how do we account for the change and disappearance that fill our experience? Parmenides in Greece and the sages of the East each intuited the permanence of Being, yet consigned the world of appearances to illusion. Their insight was profound but incomplete. Modern philosophy, science, and lived testimony now allow us to see more clearly: what we call time and change are not the destruction of Being but the eternal itself unveiling in ordered rhythms of appearing.

The Intuition of Eternity

From the dawn of philosophy, human thought has wrestled with a single, stubborn paradox: how can Being truly be, if everything we experience seems to be swept away by change, decay, and death? Few thinkers have grasped the depth of this question as powerfully as Parmenides.

Parmenides saw with piercing clarity that what is, is. Being cannot come from nothing nor pass into nothing, for nothingness is unthinkable. Therefore, Being is eternal, ungenerated, imperishable, unchanging. This insight remains one of the most indestructible truths in the history of thought.

Yet in perceiving this truth, Parmenides encountered an equally unyielding problem: the world of change, multiplicity, and becoming that our senses present to us. If Being is unchangeable, how can it appear as changing? His answer was stark: the world of change must be illusion, doxa, opinion without truth.

A parallel intuition arose in the East. The Indian traditions of Vedānta and Buddhism recognized that beneath the play of appearances there lies an eternal reality—Brahman or the emptiness (śūnyatā) that is free from birth and death. The phenomenal world is māyā: an illusion or provisional truth that deceives us into believing in permanence where there is none. As in Parmenides, the eternal is affirmed and the world of appearances diminished.

Thus both East and West reached the same luminous insight: Being is eternal, the ground unshaken by time. And both responded in the same way to the enigma of becoming: by consigning it to illusion.

The Limits of the Intuition

Yet this solution, for all its brilliance, remains incomplete.

For Parmenides, denying becoming meant denying the very reality of the world we experience. Appearances were rendered false, unreal. But the fact of their appearing cannot be so easily dismissed; we encounter change, difference, and time as undeniable elements of our lives. To negate them is to fall into contradiction.

The Eastern path, subtler, spoke of two truths: the conventional, where appearances function, and the ultimate, where only the eternal remains. But here too, the same problem emerges: appearances are stripped of full reality, and existence is divided between two levels, creating a rift that has never been entirely closed.

The history of philosophy is in large part the history of attempts to bridge this rift. Plato proposed the realm of Ideas, eternal Forms of which the sensible world is but a shadow. Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, and many others each sought ways to honor both the eternity of Being and the flux of appearances. Yet the tension endured: either the eternal was affirmed at the expense of the world, or the world was affirmed at the expense of eternity.

The Persistence of the Question

The persistence of this contradiction shows that neither dismissal nor compromise suffices. If Being is eternal, then the beings we encounter—stones, trees, persons, stars—must also participate in this eternity. And yet they appear to change, to arise, and to vanish. How can both be true?

The East called the world māyā, illusion; the West called it doxa, opinion. Both intuited that becoming is deceptive, but neither could explain how appearance itself belongs to Being without denying its reality.

The Resolution in Severino

Here lies the originality of Emanuele Severino’s thought. He reclaims the truth of Parmenides and the East while removing their contradiction.

For Severino, the world is not illusion, but the belief in becoming is. No being can ever pass into nothing or arise from nothing, for that would imply the existence of nothingness. Every being is eternal: each thing, each moment, each person, each event.

What we call “change” is not the birth or death of things, but the appearing and disappearing of eternals within the horizon of appearance. Beings do not cease to be; they only unveil themselves and then withdraw, as stars fade in the daylight but remain in the sky.

Thus appearances are not mere illusion but the very revelation of eternity. Becoming is impossible, but unveiling is necessary. The contradiction that haunted Parmenides and the East dissolves: what we call temporal is nothing other than the eternal in its ordered appearing. The duality is resolved — time itself is the rhythm of eternity’s unveiling.

Signs from the World

This resolution is not confined to philosophy. Modern physics itself, often unknowingly, bears witness to it. The conservation laws of matter and energy, and the principle of the indestructibility of information, point toward the impossibility of annihilation. What appears does not vanish into nothing; it abides eternally, even when it withdraws from view.

The most striking testimony comes from the very structure of time in modern physics. With Einstein’s relativity, time ceases to be a universal flow that carries things into and out of existence. Instead, the universe is revealed as a four-dimensional whole in which every event, past and future, is eternally inscribed within the fabric of spacetime. Karl Popper, in a telling phrase, called Einstein “Parmenides,” because his vision of the block universe mirrored the Eleatic denial of becoming. Time does not destroy what has been; it secures it forever in the order of reality.

Parallel intuitions surface in the realm of experience. Mystical encounters, religious visions, and the deepening research into near-death experiences consistently report a perception of timelessness and indestructible presence. What seemed lost is seen as eternally preserved; what seemed fleeting reveals itself as unending. These testimonies, however diverse in form, converge with physics and philosophy in suggesting that nothing ever falls into nothingness, and that death itself is not annihilation but the unveiling of what eternally is.

What It Means

The ancient intuition that the world is illusion was partially correct. It was not the world that was illusion, but the belief in its becoming, its arising and perishing. The veil of māyā and the error of doxa consist in confusing the unveiling and withdrawal of things with their coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be.

Only now, through the convergence of philosophy, science, and experience, can we see this clearly. The eternity of all things is not an abstract metaphysical postulate, but the necessary structure of reality itself.

To recognize this is to resolve the most ancient contradiction: the tension between the eternal and the temporal. Every being, from the smallest grain of sand to the most fleeting thought, is eternal. Change itself is not the destruction of things but the necessary rhythm of the eternal’s unveiling.

Conclusion

Parmenides was right to insist on the eternity of Being. The East was right to see the deceptive nature of becoming. But both fell short by consigning the world of appearances to illusion. Severino restores their insight to its full, uncontradicted clarity: the world is real, eternal, indestructible.

The question of illusion dissolves. What appeared as becoming is in truth the eternal play of unveiling. The ancient anxiety—whether Being or the world is real—finds its resolution in the recognition that all that is, eternally is.