Chapter 95 <Flying arrow does not move>

The same Zeno put forward the famous proposition that the flying arrow does not move.Zeno believed that the flying arrow is flying and moving in appearance, but it is stationary in essence. He argued that an arrow at rest occupies only a space equal to its own length, and at any instant after it begins to move it occupies an equally large space.Therefore, the flying arrow is nothing but the sum of these countless resting states. As far as the arrow itself is concerned, there is actually no flight, that is, the flying arrow is not moving.Zeno made a further generalization from this: motion does not exist.

In the view of materialist dialectics, movement itself is a contradiction, the unity of opposites of discontinuity and continuity, without the unity of opposites of the two, there is no movement. Zeno's mistake was that he only saw the discontinuity and lost the continuity, so he came to the wrong conclusion of denying the movement. According to Zeno's view that the flying arrow is the sum of countless resting states, it is impossible to answer why the flying arrow goes from one resting state to another.In fact, at any moment during the operation of the flying arrow, the flying arrow itself is the unity of opposites of continuity and discontinuity, movement and stillness.Stillness is relative, and movement is absolute (relative stillness can be understood as a special kind of movement), and there is no movement without relative stillness, but overall, the flying arrow is moving.

Zeno separated continuity and discontinuity, or the unity of opposites between movement and stillness, and opposed them, using the latter to deny the former and absolutize the latter, denying continuity in discontinuity, denying movement in stillness, As a result, he fell into metaphysical sophistry, arguing that an arrow that is obviously flying is not moving.