Parmenides

Born: C. 515 B.C., Elea, Italy, Died: After 450 B.C.

Major Work: Poem, extant only in fragments, on the "One Being" Major Ideas: A contrast must be made by philosophy between "the way of truth," concerning the oneness and changelessness of being, and "the way of seeming," concerning our perception of change. Being, or "it is," is the fullness of all that exists; not-being, or "it is not," cannot exist. Being cannot come from not-being or be reduced to not-being. Cosmology, the presentation of the world order as becoming, is false and selfcontradictory.

Although it is certain that Parmenides was born in Magna Graecia, in the city-state of Elea, sometime toward the end of the sixth century B.C., the precise dates of his birth and death are unknown. Plato tells us in his dialogue Parmenides that the great Eleatic philosopher visited Athens with Zeno and met Socrates. Parmenides, Plato tells us, was about sixty-five, Zeno about forty, and Socrates "very young." Socrates was born in 470 B.C. and the date of the meeting, granting the youthfulness of Socrates, is assumed to have been c. 450 B.C. yielding 515 B.C. for the birth of Parmenides. Although several ancient writers report that Parmenides was a Pythagorean, at least for a time, he is usually thought to have been the pupil of Xenophanes, the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. His teaching, in any case, directly reflects Xenophanes's critique of polytheism in the name of the "one god ... [who] ... abides in the selfsame place, moving not at all" and who is identical with the whole world. Like Xenophanes, Parmenides chose to elaborate his thought in the form of a poem. We may surmise that Parmenides was somewhat younger than Heraclitus (fl. 504-501 B.C.) inasmuch as Heraclitus attacks the monism of Xenophanes but gives no evidence of knowing Parmenides's thought, whereas Parmenides appears to argue directly against the cosmological theory of Heraclitus. We also know from the comments of later writers that Parmenides, like many of the early Greek philosophers, took an active role in the politics of his native city and that he even formulated the basic law code of Elea.

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However vague the biographical data concerning Parmenides, it is quite clear that his thought marks a watershed in pre-Socratic philosophy. Parmenides's thought, coming at the close of the sixth century B.C., was influenced by both the worldly, scientific, and cosmological views of early Greek philosophical inquiry and the Orphic religious revival of the early sixth century, with its focus on ecstasy, the reality of the soul as divine, the ultimate reality of "the One God who dwells in all," and the bliss of release from the body. The Orphic religion, moreover, tended to organize itself into small communities and to emphasize the cultivation of a way of life under the instruction of a revealed knowledge--a model for life and teaching very much like that adopted by later Greek philosophers and their schools. Contrary to what is commonly assumed, the earliest Greek philosophers hardly eschewed observation in favor of rational speculation about the cosmos. Thus, Xenophanes's view that "all things are earth and water" and that these two fundamental elements mingle and separate was based at least in part on his examination of fossilized seashells found in the hills. Similarly, Anaximander argued the development or evolution of man from other animals on the basis of observations of the natural order and the inability of infants to find food for themselves. Anaximander appears to have viewed the shark, which cares briefly for its young as at a midpoint in the development of higher forms of life. The question raised concerning early Greek philosophy (though certainly not solved) by the sixth-century religious revival was surely a question of the nature of reality: Was reality to be found in the observed many or in the ultimate One? To a certain extent, this question had already been posed from the philosophical side by Xenophanes, who, after studying the world in its multiplicity, had endeavored to identify an ultimate principle or principles and had spoken of the whole of the world as "the One" and as "God" in a scientific and philosophical polemic against polytheism. Even more important to the way in which Parmenides's philosophy is constructed was Heraclitus's attempt to resolve the problem: Heraclitus taught that the world is both the many and the One and that the unity of all things as the One consists in the movement of the many in their separation out of the One and their resolution into it. The ultimate unity Heraclitus identified as "Fire," presumably because of the way in which living fire both disperses smoke and consumes fuel, continually changing and continually remaining the same. The poem in which Parmenides presented his philosophical alternative to these earlier views of the world is preserved in a set of eighteen fragments quoted in Simplicius's commentary on Aristotle's Physics, written in the sixth century A.D. Simplicius still had the great library of the Academy at his disposal and he serves as the primary source for the fragments of preSocratic philosophy. Scholars have estimated on the basis both of the fragments themselves and of other ancient comments on the philosophy of Parmenides that we possess the prologue and most of the first portion of Parmenides's poem, "The Way of Truth," but very little of the second part, "The Way of Opinion" (or "of Seeming"). The prologue to the poem describes Parmenides's sudden insight into truth as a religious experience guided by divine hands. A chariot is described as bearing Parmenides toward "the gates of the ways of Night and Day." Guided by maidens, he passes through into the realm

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of the goddess Dike or Justice. He there is taught "the way of truth" and encouraged to "judge" or "examine" truth through "reason" or "rational discourse" (logos). The prologue to Parmenides's discussion of the two ways reveals much about Parmenides's thought and about the foundations and direction of Greek philosophy. First of all, the close relationship both in form and in inspiration between early Greek philosophy and Greek religion is quite apparent. Parmenides not only associates the knowledge of truth with the knowledge accessible primarily to the gods, he also understands human access to that truth as a matter of revelation rather than of mortal investigation. The very form of his prologue has suggested an Orphic revelation or "apocalypse" as his model. Of course, what Parmenides develops in his "way of truth" is not religion but philosophy, and no mention of the divine or of the need for divine assistance is mentioned beyond the mythic or allegorical language of the prologue. Nonetheless, if only in a formal sense, the perception of truth is, for Parmenides (as it would be for Socrates and Plato), a matter of penetration beyond the realm of fallible human perceptions and, indeed, a matter that must often be presented in the form of myth rather than in forms dictated by the native powers of human observation. Second, and equally important, Parmenides's prologue contains the first known use of logos as the term for rational discourse or argument, as it would be taken over by Socrates and Plato. One sees, surely, the acknowledgment of this indebtedness in Plato's dialogue the Parmenides, where the young Socrates fails in argument before the older master and is instructed by him in the intricacies of dialectical argumentation--albeit in a place where the Socratic doctrine of the participation of sensible things in the Forms is being posed against the Eleatic view of the illusory nature of the world of sense. Plato appears not so much to argue with the use of logic by the school of Parmenides as to conclude, in defense of Socrates's views, that their thought was not as strictly logical and rational as it ought to have been. There is some justice, then, in the judgment that Parmenides's philosophy of being stood in the way of the development of empirical science and, to the extent that Parmenides determined the course of Greek philosophy, it contributed to the rational investigation of the problem of the really real, the changeless reality behind phenomena, carried forward by Socrates and Plato. Like his teacher Xenophanes and Alcmaeon, the Pythagorean, Parmenides could draw a distinction between the certainty of ultimate or divine knowledge and the uncertainty of sense experience, but it was the burden of Parmenides's philosophy to adopt the standpoint of what Alcmaeon and others would have identified as divine knowing. The uncertainty and apparent knowing characteristic of human beings who examine the world of variety, distinction, and flux is set aside by Parmenides's identification of true knowledge as a certainty concerning the changelessness of the One. Rather than find knowledge in and through the examination of externals, Parmenides rests knowledge on the divine revelation of truth. In his poetic philosophical manifesto, he is conducted by "the daughters of the Sun" from the "abode of Night" and instructed by the goddess in the distinction between "well-rounded truth" and "the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true belief." The "well-rounded truth" concerning changeless being is a truth of the pure intellect, which cannot be known through sense experience and cannot be reached by a process of logical

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progression or regression from the world of change to the realm of Being. By Parmenides's own account, "the way of truth" is revealed in a moment to the intellect alone, from beyond the grasp of sensuous human knowing, and consists in a meditation on the nature and character of the realization that "it is" rather than "it is not." Aristotle, whose emphasis on the senses as the genuine avenues of knowledge led him in precisely the opposite direction from Parmenides, saw that Parmenides assumed two ways of knowing: the one resting on reason or intellect and recognizing that "all things are one," and the other resting on sense perception and falling into the assumption that reality is diverse or "plural." Parmenides not only offered a trenchant critique of the cosmological tendencies of previous Greek philosophy, he also posed the critique in such a way as to redirect the course of Greek thought. His view of reality took as its point of departure the logical flaw in earlier theories of cosmological becoming, particularly the view of Heraclitus that the universal fire transforms into the varieties of things and then returns again to itself. Not only was it a truism in this earlier philosophy that nothing can be generated from nonexistence, it was also the case that the earlier philosophy could not explain why or how the ultimate principle transforms itself. In other words, Parmenides recognized that the philosophies of change could find no genuine explanation for the change that was so fundamental to their conception of reality. Parmenides, therefore, argued the opposite view: Rather than identifying reality with change or becoming and the stability of being with semblance or illusion, he referred all change to the problems inherent in sense perception and identified reality as changeless existence. Parmenides assumed that, logically, there could be only two ways of understanding reality-and a third way caused by confused thinking. Thus either something exists and must exist or nothing exists: Reality is to be conceived either as being ("it is not"). The second logical option is, of course, an impossibility that defies the very process of knowing: "For you could never learn what is not; that is impossible; nor could you describe it." The third way assumes, in Parmenides's own cryptic phrasing, that "to be and not to be are thought the same and not the same" or that "things that are not are"--in other words, that what is and what is not are somehow convertible and interchangeable, much after the pattern of Heraclitus's philosophy. After excluding this third way as a result of confusion, Parmenides considers the two ways of approaching the world and reality: "the way of truth" and "the way of opinion." In Parmenides's way of thinking, the impossible and unknowable approach to reality as notbeing or what is not, "the way of opinion," is precisely the approach of previous philosophy, granting that it has concentrated on the changing world of human sense perception and has refused to contemplate that which simply is--that which "is" and is, therefore, "without beginning, indestructible, entire, single, unshakable, endless...." Parmenides's view of reality is not, as might be inferred from subsequent discussions of being and not-being, a form of idealism that identifies reality as a supersensible or intelligible Form, distinct and separate from matter. Rather, Parmenides's philosophy appears to have been a thoroughgoing materialism that dwelt on the truth that something "is" and that, therefore, "it is" constitutes the ground of philosophical meditation, not "it is not."

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This unity of what is, Parmenides viewed as finite, indivisible, immovable, and spherical. Since all that is simply is, and since "it is not" cannot be said to be without contradiction, there can be nothing apart from what is and no empty space. What simply is cannot come into or pass out of existence. By the same logic, what is must be complete in itself and have nothing beyond it--and it must be equally complete in all directions. Far from being a consideration of the opposite side of the problem of the world, therefore, the second half of Parmenides's poem, "the way of seeming," is nothing other than a recitation of the conclusions reached by the erroneous examination of the world by the senses. Here Parmenides speaks of "the substance of the sky," and "the wandering motions of the round-faced moon." Indeed, Parmenides discusses these conclusions in order that "no opinion of mortals will ever surpass" him or his followers. The value of this second part of the poem, therefore, must be restricted to what it tells us of the cosmology of Parmenides's contemporaries, most probably the Pythagoreans. The importance of Parmenides derives from his application and elaboration of the Eleatic assumption of the ultimate reality of the One, inherited from Xenophanes. Parmenides recognized that the great issue of Greek philosophy was the problem of the One and the many, of being and becoming, which he expressed in his radical dichotomy, "either it is or it is not." He is the father in a direct sense of later materialism and, in an indirect sense, as witnessed by Plato's Parmenides, of the Socratic and Platonic attempt to reestablish a relationship between the One and the many on idealist grounds, with the One considered as Form and the many as its embodiments. Further Reading Guthrie, W.K.C.A History of Greek Philosophy. 6 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962-81. The definitive modern study, excelling all other works on the subject in detail and grasp of the materials. The treatment of Parmenides is found in vol. 2, pp. 1-80. Nahm, Milton C. Selections from Early Greek Philosophy. 4th ed. New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1964. A good modern translation of the major fragments and collateral testimonies. Zeller, Eduard. A History of Greek Philosophy from the Earliest period to the Time of Socrates. 2 vols. Trans. S. F. Alleyne. London: Longmans, 1881. A classic work that offers useful discussion of the various pre-Socratic philosophers together with an excellent sense of the development and movement of early Greek philosophy. _________________ This article is by Richard A. Muller, and is taken from Great Thinkers of the Western World, Edition 1992 p3(4). COPYRIGHT HarperCollins Publishers 1992.

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