Parmenides of Elea (feb 15, 515 BC – feb 28, 450 BC)

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The point from which I start
Is common; for there shall I return again.
- Proclus, Commentary on Plato's 'Parmenides' 708.15-16 Cousin.

Parmenides lived in Elea in the late 6th Century early 5th century BC. He is widely considered to be the greatest of the Pre-Socratic philosopher and an essential figure in the of Western-Philosophy. He primarily influences Plato (John Marshall references the fact that Plato claims to have indeed even met him while Palmer claims that the story is a fiction) and Aristotle; particularly in the field of metaphysics. Waterfield attributes him with great worth stating: "After Parmenides, Presocratic thought could not remain the same, since subsequent thinkers felt they had to respond to the challenge he offered to all scientific thought; and the resolution of certain logical difficulties he raised sharpened the thought of both Plato and Aristotle." (2000, p.49). He is credited as being the father of Metaphysics, Logic and the Eleastic School of thought; "a philosophy label ascribed to Presocratics who purportedly argued that reality is in some sense a unified and unchanging singular entity (DeLong). Parmenides represents a break from the previous thinkers, he is highly critical of their attempts to identify the origins of all matter in water, fire and wind.

Parmenides is the earliest philosopher in the Presocratic tradition who's works have survived in any substantive sense. His only written work, an enigmatic poem by the name of 'On Nature' -
which even the like of Plato remarked impenetrable nature - is a fascinating tale laid out not too unlike Homer's Odyssey, tells a tale of a man (probably himself) in search of cosmic enlightenment. It has three main sections: The Proem (prelude), Reality and Opinion (DeLong). The poem was said to roughly eight-hundred verses long, roughly one-hundred and sixty of which have survived (Palmer 2016). The poem has given birth to a number of interpretation in various ages, a testimony to its brilliance perhaps that so many people are able to see different perspectives and arguments in it. Indeed the text is very cryptic and it is difficult to get one's head around its various interpretations and claims.

Basically, our protagonist is conveyed on a chariot by two maiden daughters of the sun from the abode of night into the day. He is brought before Lady Justice who tells him:

It was no ill fate that prompted you to travel this way,
Which is indeed far from mortal men, beyond their beaten paths;
No, it was Right and Justice. You must learn everything -
Both the steady heart of well-rounded truth,
And the beliefs of mortals, in which there is no true trust.
Still, you shall learn them too, and come to see how beliefs
Must exist in an acceptable form, all pervasive as they altogether are.

(pieced together (by Waterfield) from Sextus Empiricys, 'Against the Professors 7.111 Bury; and Simplocius, 'Commentary on Aristotle's 'On the Heavens', CAG VII, 557.25-558.2 Heiberg: I myself found it in Waterfield 2000, p.51).

So our hero finds himself escaping from Plato's cave so to speak, he has emerged into daylight and the vial which mortals have taken to be true existence, has been cast aside by the goddess. Effectively what Lady Justice is saying here is that 'mortals' have it all wrong and do not see the world of appearances for what it really is; and that there is an underlining all pervasive truth he must learn. What follows is some essential highlights of what the goddess reveals:

There is the way that it is and it cannot be:
This is the path of Trust, for Truth attends it.
Then there is the way that it is not and that it must not be:
This, as I show you, is an altogether misguided route.
For you may not know what-is-not - there is no end to it -
Nor may you tell of it.

...

It must be that what can be spoken and thought is, for it is there for being
And there is no such thing as nothing. There are the guidelines I suggest for you.
For I shall start my exposition to you first with this way of seeking,
And then go on to the one on which mortals, knowing nothing,
Stray two-headed; for confusion in their breasts
Leads astray their thinking. On this way they journey
Deaf and Blind, bewildered, indecisive herds,
In whose thinking being and not being are the same
And yet not the same. For all of them the path turns back on itself.

...

For never shall this be overcome, so that things-that-are-not are;
And do not let habit compel you, along this well-tried path,
To wield the aimless eye and noise-filled ear and tongue,
But use reason to come to a decision on the contentious test
I have announced.

...

Now only one tale remains
Of the Way that it is. On the way there are very many signs
Indicating that what-is is unborn and imperishable,
Entire, alone of its kind, unshaken, and complete.
It was not once nor will it be, since it is now, all together,
Single, and continuous. For what birth could you seek for it?
How and from what did it grow? Neither will I allow you to say
Or to think that it grew from what-is-not, for that it is not
Cannot be spoken or thought. Also, what need could have impelled it
To arise later or sooner, if it sprang from an origin in nothing?

...

Thus birth has been extinguished and perishing made inconceivable.
Nor can it be divided, since all alike it is. Nor is there
More of it here and an inferior amount of it elsewhere,
Which would restrain it from cohering, but it is all full of what-is.
Now changeless within the limits of great bonds,
It is without beginning and without end, since birth and perishing
Have been driven far off, and true trust has cast them away.
It stays in the same state and in same place , lying by itself,
And so it stays firmly as it is, for mighty Necessity (note the capital)
Holds it in the bonds of a limit which restrains it all about,
Because it is not lawful for what-is to be incomplete.
For there is no lack of it; if there were, it would lack everything.
The same thing both can be thought and is that which enables thinking.
For you will not find thinking apart from what-is, on which it depends
For its expression. For apart from what-is nothing else
Either is or will be, since what-is is what Fate bound
To be entire and changeless. Therefore all those things which moral men,
Trusting in their true reality, have proposed, are no more than names -

(All of the previous passages quoted from Waterfield's incredibly informative book which I would advice anyone who is seeking a more informative and authoritative voice on the Presocratics)

Parmenides here is laying out his Metaphysics (his theory of being, time and space). He essentially believes that the 'world of appearances' in other words, our epistemic and ontological beliefs, are false. That they are part of existence which we mere mortals perceive with our senses; the radical underlining claim of this poem is the postulation that what our senses perceive is what-is-not and not what-is. He does this through an interesting sequence of logical speculations. The first being an epistemic argument:

"the mortals in this way are the same as the mortals whose opinions are reflected in the 'Way of Appearance', the second half of the poem, then the problem with the way is one of polar thinking, of seeing things in terms of opposites, as 'F and not-F'. So mortals are 'two-headed', Janus-like figures [second picture], looking both forward and backwards, because although they appear to be saying 'is' about something, it turns out that what they are saying it might just as well be 'is not'." (Waterfield 2000, p.51)

So these names which mortals give to various phenomena he argues to be effectively nonsensical. In the process of identifying phenomena and the process of Ontology, we attribute that they possess and it seems what Parmenides is claiming, is that we might as well be distinguishing them by what they are not; that in truth we should recognise the fundamental nature of the world, that all is one unchanging Whole behind the world of appearances. To see through this 'world of appearances' one must employ reason, to trust in reason and not in the senses. He proposes from this that world in the words of Guthrie, is nothing but a "deceitful show". He uses this reason to propose a series of logical arguments to disprove the 'world of appearance':

"Parmenides has argued that following through the logic of just 'it is' reduces everything to an unchanging singularity, so that the only possible subject of 'is' is just this singularity, and nothing else. Thus, at a stroke Parmenides repudiated all the attempts of his predecessors to explain phenomena such as creation and change, and set up a severe challenge to those scientist-philosophers who came after him. As Colotes appears to have claims, Parmenides seems to have argues away the real existence of the phenomenal world altogether... [by arguing that] First, creation must take place either from what-is or from what-is-not. In a 'neither... nor' dilemma, eliminate the latter possibility (on the grounds that there is no such thing as what-is-not, and change from what -is-not is absurd), and then eliminate the former possibility (on the ground that there can be no extra 'what-is' for 'what-is' to be created from). What-is exists in an unbroken continuum, from the infinite past and into the infinite future. Parmenides does not argue for what-is being imperishable, but allows us to infer that, mutatis mutandis, the same argument eliminate perishing too... then [he argues] that what -is must be a singularity, continues in both space and time: there are no gaps of not being in what-is (Waterfield 2000, p.52-53).

Some further interesting interpretation of Parmenides's poem have been offered by many scholars through the Millennia. W. K. C. Guthrie argued that Parmenides was expressing a monist notion; that this all encompassing sphere is a sort of God figure, or perhaps one could interpret it in a wider Pantheist or even Buddhist inclination. Some of the greatest minds of the 20th Century such as Bertram Russel have weighed in on the debate introducing a 'Logical-Dialectical' Interpretation. Russel explains that the problem Parmenides perceives with notions of what-is and what-is-not is:

"When you think, you think of something; when you use a name, it must be the name of something. Therefore both thought and language require objects outside themselves. And since you can think of a thing or speak of it at one time as well as another, whatever can be thought of or spoken of must exist at all times. Consequently there can be no change, since change consists in things coming into being or ceasing to be" (Russell 1945, 49).

One can also understand why Jowett seems to attribute him with title of father of Idealism; as he argues for the relation off all things at that this Whole must be all encompassing and perfect.

In the latter part of the poem Parmenides begins to postulate a cosmological theory which surprises most if not all scholars, due to the fact that he seems to dismiss all constructive theorising upon the world of appearances, of phenomena, so why does he do so anyway? His cosmology is I feel of little significance to his wider philosophical beliefs (Palmer would certainly disagree). There are however a few things of note: he recognised the suns essential element to be fire and that the moon's light was derived from it.

DeLong, J. C., (Not Stated). Parmenides of Elea. In Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [Online]: http://www.iep.utm.edu/parmenid/
Accessed on 16/2/18.

Marshall, J., (1891). A Short History of Greek Philosophy.

Palmer, J., (2016). Parmenides. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [Online]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/parmenides/
Accessed on 16/2/18.

Waterfield, R., (2000). The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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