The Meeting of West and East: The Philosophy of Rational Love in Parmenides of Elea and Herman Hesse's Siddhartha.
In the analysis of the representation of the "way of truth" and the "way of opinion" in the work of Parmenides, we are confronted with the problem presented by the second half of the poem where a description of the physical world seems to contradict the principles of method which Parmenides lays out in the first part of his poem. This paper will argue that a way of reconciling this apparent contradiction may be found if we compare Parmenides' approach to phenomenal reality with that of another philosophical tradition: Buddhism. The novel Siddhartha, by the Swiss Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse, addresses many of the same issues as Parmenides with respect to how we are to distinguish between the "opinions" of mortals and grasp a "true" sense of the real world. 8.5 pgs. 13 f/c. 2b.
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