By: A.C. Grayling
Parmenides was born to a wealthy family at Elea either around the year 515 BCE, as Diogenes Laertius says, or a decade or two later, so that Plato’s claim that the young Socrates met him around 450 BCE can be regarded as plausible. Diogenes follows Aristotle in saying that he was a pupil of Xenophanes, but that he did not agree with Xenophanes’ views. However, like his teacher he wrote his philosophy in verse, using Homeric hexameters embellished with Homeric images, especially from the Odyssey. Diogenes says that it was also claimed that Parmenides studied with Anaximander, and that at one point in his life he associated closely with a Pythagorean called Ameinias, of whom he was very fond, as evidenced by the fact that when the latter died he built a shrine to him ‘as to a hero’. One reason suggested for this devotion was that Ameinias had persuaded Parmenides to dedicate his life to philosophy. Some in the doxographic tradition described Parmenides as a Pythagorean, and there is no reason to think he might not have been one in his earlier days, though by the time he wrote his poem he no longer was.
Parmenides’ poem tells of a young man who is taken up in a chariot to meet a goddess, who promises him that he will learn all things from her. But, she says, even though everything she tells him will be true, he must test what she says for himself: ‘judge by argument’, she says, ‘the much disputed proof uttered by me.’ After a lengthy introduction, the Proem, the poem itself begins with the first of two sections, entitled ‘Truth’. We have about 150 lines of the poem, over two-thirds of it from this section. The second section is entitled ‘Opinion’, and the goddess warns that it concerns a view of the world that is deceptive; it is about our ordinary, sense-based view of the world, and the senses are misleading. By contrast, the first section, ‘Truth’, tells us that knowledge properly so called is possible only in relation to ‘What Is’, to reality, because ‘What Is Not’ literally cannot be thought or said. Only reason can get us to the truth about What Is.
This truth is that What Is must be a single unchanging and complete thing, perfect, whole and eternal. The views of other philosophers, premised on the transformation of an arche into a plurality of things based on motion and change, on interaction, flux, reparation, mingling or whatever the thinkers in question have suggested, are false in the light of reason, for only an eternal, immutable and comprehensive One is thinkable.
At the beginning of the section entitled ‘Opinion’ the goddess says, ‘Here shall I close my trustworthy speech and thought about the truth. Henceforward learn the beliefs of mortals, giving ear to the deceptive ordering of my words.’ She then sets out a cosmology in which fire is of the heavens and is opposed to ‘dark night, a compact and heavy body … everything is full at once of light and dark night, both equal, since neither has anything to do with the other.’ In the heavens ‘Necessity’ binds the stars; the sun, moon, Milky Way and other phenomena are either ‘unmixed fire’ or have their portion of night, this explaining the variation among them; and ‘in the midst of these is the divinity that directs the course of all things; for she is the beginner of all painful birth and all begetting, driving the female to the embrace of the male, and the male to that of the female.’
But this ‘way of opinion’ or ‘way of seeming’ is, to repeat, deceptive; it is the path ‘wandered by know-nothing two headed mortals’ who think they live in a world of contingency, plurality and change. On the deceptive evidence of their senses they believe that things can both be and not be – because, for example, a thing can have a certain property at one time and lack it at another. ‘Do not follow this path out of habit, relying on your senses,’ the goddess again warns the young man; ‘judge by reason.’ But it is important to know this ‘way of seeming’ so that one can contrast it properly with the way of truth. ‘You must find out everything,’ she tells him, ‘both the steadfast heart of well-rounded truth and the opinions of mortals. In these opinions there is no truth, but you must learn them anyway.
’ The central point in Parmenides’ system turns on what he meant by ‘What Is’. He has the goddess say that What Is is ‘unborn and unperishing … a unique whole … unmoved … perfect, complete’. And she adds, ‘Nor Was It once, nor Will It be, for It Is Now, One, Continuous.’ The questions this raises are: is the What Is physical, or is it a non physical thing, an abstraction like ‘the infinite’ or perhaps a god? If it is physical how do we make sense of the fact that, on almost all views, spatio-temporal properties are distinctive, indeed defining, of the physical, whereas Parmenides’ What Is is both all there is (all space) and does not change (at very least complicating what can be understood by time, if time exists at all)?
Obviously this interpretative question is controversial, but the larger consensus is that Parmenides viewed the What Is as physical. One fragment describes it as a sphere, and Aristotle stated that Parmenides did not believe in any sort of non-physical reality. Nor does he speak of a ‘god’ or ‘gods’ in connection with reality (the goddess of the poem is a literary device merely), but appears to regard What Is as the universe itself, as everything viewed in totality as one thing – a plenum or complete fullness of physical reality.
This raises the question whether the sphere is infinite, for if not then space has to be finite so that the sphere can fill it completely. Either way, if the sphere is physical it has to comprehend all space because it is unmoving and unmovable; and because it is unchanging we have to think either that there is no such thing as time, or What Is comprehends all time in one changeless present. This seems to be the meaning of the fragment stating ‘Neither is there, nor will there be, time apart from being, because fate has bound it down to the whole and unmoved.’ That at least is consistent with the central thesis that reality is an unchanging One; on the view that time exists only where there is change, in the envisaged plenum of What Is there can be no change and hence no time, or only an eternal present.
Indeed as there can be nothing beyond or outside What Is, the particular concepts of change and motion are empty. There could only be change and motion if beyond What Is there is also What Is Not, in this sense: if you think with Anaximenes that the arche rarefies and condenses, then the change of one state (more rarefied) into the other state (more condensed) and vice versa presupposes that the state into which the arche changes its aspect was, as it were, not there – there was no ‘being more condensed’ for the ‘less condensed’ to become more of, for if there were no such not-thenexistent state, there would not be something for a different state to change into. Likewise, the Pythagoreans’ talk of the air outside the cosmos which enters to separate the cosmos into distinct units also assumes the existence of ‘what is not’, as the thing that motion and change act upon to turn it into ‘what is’.
The key point for Parmenides is that one cannot think about what is not, whereas anything that can be thought must be. ‘It is the same thing that can be thought and that can be … It needs must be that what can be spoken and thought is; for it is possible for it to be and it is not possible for what is nothing to be.’ Another way of putting this is to say: if you think, you must be thinking of something; therefore there cannot be nothing. ‘Only that can exist which can be thought thought exists for the sake of what is.’
Note that Parmenides does not offer mere assertions in the section on Truth; he offers arguments. The striking contrast between the two sections of the poem lies in the fact that in the first we are asked to consider that What Is has to be comprehensive – it has the character of tautology to say ‘whatever is, is’ – and that one cannot think or say What Is Not because What Is Not is by definition nothing. It appears paradoxical to think that one might have Nothing as the object of one’s thought. One might reasonably have much to say about how in fact we talk about what is not the case (but which is possible, or was the case, or will be the case but is not so yet, and so on), and one might question the claim that the realm of the real and the realm of the conceivable are necessarily the same and exclusive. But at least these are deep challenges, and philosophy has grappled with them throughout its history. This is very different from saying ‘there is fire and dark night, and the mixture of the two, and in the midst of things the divinity that directs their courses …’ We see from earlier Presocratics that not all such theorizing – ‘the arche is water … is air’ – is mere assertion, but rests on some sort of observational and inferential support; but the ‘way of seeming’ in Parmenides’ poem does not have quite that character, even if it borrows from what was undoubtedly an observational base in asserting that fire is of the heavens, because where could the light of the heavenly bodies come from if they were not themselves fires or emanations of fire? And as it happens, they are indeed fires – or, for the more local of them, reflections of fire.
Parmenides was not quite as obscure a writer as Heraclitus, but the hexameter verse in which his system is expounded nevertheless creates difficulties for a clear interpretation. Despite that, he marks a highly significant moment in the history of philosophy; he is a turning point, for the influence he exerted on those who came after him was enormous, whether they accepted his views or disagreed with him. His followers Zeno and Melissus defended his theory of the One, Zeno with his famous paradoxes Achilles and the tortoise and the rest: see below – aimed at demonstrating the impossibility of time and change, while any thinker who accepted the reality of change and plurality had to address Parmenides’ arguments and find ways of overcoming them.
Parmenides’ greatest influence, from the point of view of impact on the entire subsequent history of philosophy, was on Plato and the Platonists. Plato admired Parmenides greatly; he has him worsting Socrates in a late dialogue, and he derives from him the view that the senses and what they tell us about the world of appearances – the familiar world around us, which seems plural and subject to time and change – deceive us as to the true nature of reality. That is a theme which has underwritten an enormous amount of what philosophy and, later, science has achieved.
