Numbers in parentheses refer to the standard listing of Parmenides’ fragments. Those in brackets are endnotes.
Parmenides was my
favorite when as a student I first read the pre-Socratic philosophers. I was, I imagine, attracted by his
dramatically startling claims. The
paradoxes of his disciple Zeno delight everyone with a taste for tossing
concepts about. A generation or two
later Socrates’ dialectics, Aristotle’s ratiocination, and the theatrical
gestures of Diogenes would open up philosophy in other directions, but the
fundamental challenge of Parmenides’ thought remained unchanged, as immovable
as the plenum he imagined.
Paradoxically,
though Parmenides’ conclusions seem outlandish from the perspective of everyday
reality, they are peculiarly reasonable to a skeptical modern sensibility. To me he represents the most profound ancient
Greek statement of a perennial philosophy in the classic modern form
represented by Transcendentalism and, in the twentieth century, Neo-Vedanta. Parmenides has in common with Huxley (and
mystics in different parts of the globe throughout the centuries) the
apprehension of an ultimate reality underlying sense experience which is, to
use Parmenides’ language “unitary, unmoving and without
end” (μουνογενές τε καὶ ἀτρεμὲς ἠδ᾽ ἀτέλεστον). (347)
After millennia
in which our species had used the poetic devices of analogy and metaphor in
religion, magic, ritual, and mythological thought, Parmenides proposed using
only the mind. From the simple
proposition that one can say nothing about the nonexistent or “what is not,”
Parmenides developed provocative and astonishing conclusions. The phenomenal world is in some sense “unreal;”
motion and change are impossible as the cosmos is monistic, the only thing that
exists.
He arrives at
such a strikingly counterintuitive position by significant rhetorical and
dialectical routes. The title of his
principal work Περὶ Φύσεως is sometimes translated On Nature but its
concerns are so fundamental that it might have been called On What Exists. A dramatic proem sets the angle of
Parmenides’ approach. The philosopher’s
insight is attributed to his having been taken on a journey by the maiden
daughters of the sun, arriving at a gate in the borderland between Night and
Day at which point he encounters a goddess [1] who delivers to him the
knowledge he conveys to the reader. Though
the location signifies the duality that constitutes the ordinary experience of
reality, [2] she offers a route to a unified vision.
The divinity
would seem to be Night herself: Parmenides goes to “the halls of Night,” and
the goddess who greets him welcomes him to “our home” (1). The goddess Night serves as counselor to Zeus
in some of the major Orphic texts, including the Derveni cosmology. In the
closely related Orphic Rhapsodies, Night instructs Zeus on how to preserve the
unity produced by his absorption of all things into himself as he sets about
initiating a new cosmogonic phase. It is thus appropriate that Night should be
the source of Parmenides’ revelation, for Parmenidean metaphysics is very much
concerned with the principle of unity in the cosmos.
This deity’s
specific identity, though, is less important than the fact that the
mythological language implies that Parmenides’ ideas are not as attributable to
rigorous ratiocination as to revelation or intuitive insight. The goddess promises to reveal to him “well-rounded
truth” (aληθείης εὐκυκλέος) [3] in
contrast to the “opinions of people, in which there is nothing true at all” (βροτῶν
δόξας͵ ταῖς οὐκ ἔνι πίστις ἀληθής). (fr. 342, stressed again in 346)
In the voice of
this goddess, Parmenides proceeds, arguing that, as no one can meaningfully
conceive of what does not exist, human thoughts must concern only “what
is.” (2)
His language here outpaces his reasoning which has been criticized as
specious by modern scholars who note his conflation of the existential and
predicative uses of the verb “to be.” [4]
The criticism will carry little weight for readers who have accepted the
introduction with its mystic quasi-shamanic flight, suggesting that the
philosopher’s vision rests on experience and intuition, on meditation perhaps,
rather than on logic.
He argues that
most people conveniently ignore logic when they treat what is and what is not
sometimes as the same and sometimes as differing. They are “two-headed,” helpless in their
ignorance. (6) Yet this error is the
basis for the conventional way of seeing the world, what Parmenides calls the “way
of appearances” [5](or seeming or opinion).
(See 1 and 8)
“What is” is a
kind of universal substance that must be “unitary, unmoving and without end.” There is no void or emptiness since a plenum
fills all of existence. Contrary to
appearances, there is no growth, there is no change, there is no beginning or
end. Reality cannot be divided, for it
is alike everywhere (οὐδέ τι τῇ μᾶλλον, τό κεν εἴργοι μιν συνέχεσθαι). Like Einstein’s universe, it is finite,
though without beginning or end. It may
best be imagined as a sphere. (8)
I am not
concerned with tracing sources, among which others have noted Xenophanes,
Pythagoras, and others, nor do I wish to detail influences, through neo-Platonism,
Epicureanism, Pyrrhonisn Skepticism, pseudo-Dionysius, certain medieval mystics
and Spinoza. My point is quite simply
the fundamental similarity of Parmenides’ monism and the tradition some have
called the perennial philosophy. Perhaps
the most significant and concise statement of this view is the Advaita Vedanta
teaching grounded in the Chāndogya Upanişad. In the seminal sixth book Uddalaka explains
to his son Śvetaketu that a single substance underlies all phenomena including
themselves. “Tat tvam asi.” (“That art
thou!”) he declares. There is no other
-- the fabric of reality is continuous.
According to Advaita Vedanta, the individual and the deity or cosmos are
identical: atman = Atman.
Parmenides goes
on to relate what he calls the “way of opinion” providing an elaborate
cosmology that once occupied the greater part of his book, but which is largely
lost. Though this portion of his work
more closely parallels the speculation of earlier philosophers, it was less
distinctive as well as being undercut by the author’s repeated assurances that his
assertions in this section refer to appearances only, the way things seem, and
not their real nature, rather like the Hindu concept of maya.
Parmenides is
associated by Strabo with the cult of Apollo Oulios, an epithet usually
rendered as the Healer, though the primary meaning of the word in Liddell and
Scott is “pestilential” suggesting the hand of the Far-darter in plague and
disease. [6] Apollo is then defined, in
sum at least, as indifferent to human desire just as the Hindu deities often
have beneficent and malign manifestations.
Apollo and the cosmos as a whole are not so much ambivalent or
unpredictable as utterly beyond good and evil.
For Parmenides would deny the final validity of disease and health, pain
and joy, indeed of all dualities. For
him such contraries are the illusion from which arises the “way of appearances”
as opposed to the “way of truth.”
Such insights
have rarely attracted many disciples. Whatever
heights Hindu philosophers achieved, the average Indian is satisfied with
customary sacrifices and other forms of formulaic worship. In ancient Greece Pythagoreans and other
mystery religions (including eventually Christianity) gained many followers
with the promise that the individual soul was immortal and only the cult could
provide supposed means to improve well-being after death. Conventional religion has often displayed little
patience with the monistic assertions: Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, and
Spinoza were all indicted by their communities for expressing European versions
of the Upanishad’s “tat tvam asi.”
Specifically
because their conclusions are experiential, attempts to rationalize the
revelations of mystical flights like that Parmenides relates at the outset of
his work, such thinkers are as immune to logical refutation as to proof. They can only record their own insights (or
seeming insights) and point a way for others seeking the “way of truth.” Side-stepping the slipperiness of language
and the dubious claims of syllogisms, they present a spirituality independent
of supernaturalism, authority, and tradition.
1.
1. Identified variously as night, Nature, Wisdom,
Necessity or Themis.
2.
2. Thus the account in Genesis describes
creation of material reality through a series of oppositions: light and dark,
earth and sky, water and land.
3.
3. Compare this usage to the description of the
cosmos as spherical in Plato, Timaeus 32c-34b.
4.
4. See, for instance, G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The
Presocratic Philosophers, p. 269-70.
5.
5. Parmenides’ word δόξα might also be translated
as “seeming” or “opinion.”
6.
6. The pattern is the same with φάρμακον, meaning
both medicine and poison, a circumstance of which Derrida made a great deal in
“Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination.
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