Kenny Anthony. Ancient Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy Volume 1

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of their own nature and character. The responsibility that he defends is the

autonomy of the agent to act unforced by external causes and stimuli.

From the time of Chrysippus up to the present day philosophers have

debated how far it is possible to reconcile determinism and freedom. One of

the most interesting contributions in the ancient world was made by St

Augustine, in his work on the freedom of the will, written in the year of his

conversion to Christianity. However, since he locates his discussion in an

ethical and theological context, we shall wait to consider it until Chapter 8.

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What There Is:

Metaphysics

he central topic of metaphysics is ontology: the study of Being. The

word ‘ontology’ derives from the Greek word ‘on’ (in the plural

‘onta’), which is the present participle of ‘einai’, the ver b ‘to be’. In

Greek, as in English, a deWnite article can be placed in front of a participle

to mark out a class of people or things: as whe n we talk of the living or of

the dying, meaning all the people who are now living or all the people who

are now dying. The founder of ontology was Parmenides, and he de W ned

his topic by placing the deWnite article ‘to’ in front of the participle ‘on’. ‘To

on’, literally ‘the being’, on the model of ‘the living’, means: all that is. It is

customary to translate the expression into English as ‘Being’ with an initial

capital. Without a capital, the English word ‘being’ has, in philosophy, two

uses, one corresponding to the Greek participle and one to the Greek

inWnitive. A being, we can say, using the participle, is an individual that is;

whereas being (using the verbal noun) is, as it were, what any individual

being is engaged in. The totality of individual beings make up Being.

These rather tedious grammatical distinctions need making, because

neglect of them can lead, and has led, even great philosophers into

confusion. In order to understand Parmenides, one further important

distinction has to be made: between being and existence.

‘To be’ in English, and its equivalent in Greek, can certainly mean ‘to

exist’. Thus, Wordsworth tells us, ‘She lived unknown, and few could

know j When Lucy ceased to be.’ In English the use is largely poetic, and

it is not natural to say such things as ‘The pyramids are, but the Colossus of

Rhodes is not’, when we mean that the pyramids are still in existence,

while the Colossus is not. But analogous statements would be quite natural

in ancient Greek, and this sense of ‘be’ is certainly involved in Parmenides’

talk of Being. All that there is, all that exists, is included in Being.

However, the Greek verb ‘to be’ occurs not only in sentences such as

‘Troy is no more’ but also in sentences of many diVerent kinds, such

as ‘Helen is beautiful’, ‘Aphrodite is a goddess’, ‘Achilles is brave’, and so on

through all the diVerent modes that Aristotle was to dignify as categories.

For Parmenides, Being is not just that which exists, but that of which any

sentence containing ‘is’ is true. Equally, being is not just existing (being,

period) but being anything whatever: being hot or being cold, being earth

or being water, and so on. Thus interpreted, Being is a realm both richer

and more puzzling than the totality of existents.

Parmenides’ Ontology

Let us now look in detail at some of Parmenides’ mysterious claims,

expressed in his rugged verse, which I have tried to render in an equally

clumsy translation.

What you can call and think must Being be

For Being can, and nothing cannot, be. (DK 28 B6)

The Wrst line (literally: ‘What is for saying and for thinking must be’)

expresses the universality of Being: whatever you can call by any name,

whatever you can think of, must be. Why so? Presumably because if I utter

a name or think a thought, I must be able to answer the question ‘What is it

that you are talking about or thinking of?’ The message of the second line

(literally ‘It is for being be but nothing is not’) is that anything that can be

at all must be something or other; it cannot be just nothing.

The matter becomes clearer when Parmenides, in a later fragment,

introduces a negative notion to correspond to Being.

Never shall this prevail, that Unbeing is;

Rein in your mind from any thought like this. (DK 28 B7, 1–2)

My ‘Unbeing’ represents the negation of Parmenides’ participle (me eonta).

I use the word instead of some formula such as ‘not-being’ because the

context makes clear that Parmenides’ Greek expression, though a perfectly

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Parmenides and Heraclitus, neighbours in Raphael’s School of Athens

natural one, is meant to designate a polar opposite of Being. If Being is that

of which something or other, no matter what, is true, then Unbeing is

that of which nothing at all is true. And that, surely, is nonsense: not only

can it not exist, it cannot even be thought of.

Unbeing you won’t grasp—it can’t be done—

Nor utter; being thought and being are one.

If we understand ‘Unbeing’ as meaning that to which no predicate can be

attached, then it is surely correct to say that it is something unthinkable. If,

in answer to your question ‘What kind of thing are you thinking of ?’, I say

that it isn’t any kind of thing, you will be puzzled. If, fu rther, I cannot tell

you what it is like, or indeed tell you anything at all about it, you may

justly conclude that I’m not thinking of anything, indeed not really

thinking at all. If we understand Parmenides in this sense, we can agree

that to be thought of and to be go together.

But granting this much, we may still want to protest against the

sweeping claim that being thought and being are one. It may be the case

that if I am to think of X I must be able to attach, in thought, some

predicate to X. But it is not the case that any thought I have about X must

be true: I can think that X is P when X is not P. If we take the dictum in that

way, then it is false: being thought and being true are two very diVerent

things.

Again, we can agree that Unbeing cannot be thought of without

agreeing that what does not exist cannot be thought of. We can think of

Wctional heroes and chimerical beasts who never existed. If it were true that

what does not exist cannot be thought of, we could prove that things exist

simply by thinking of them. Did Parmenides believe we could? Given the

contortions of his language, it is hard to be sure. Some schol ars claim that

he confused the ‘is’ of predication (involved in the true claim that Unbeing

cannot be thought of) with the ‘is’ of existence (involved in the false claim

that the non-existent cannot be thought of). It is, I think, more helpful to

say rather that Parmenides always treats ‘to be’—in any of its uses—as a

fully Xedged verb. That is to say, he thinks of ‘being water’ or ‘being air’

as related to ‘being’ in the same way as ‘running fast’ and ‘running slowly’

is related to ‘running’. In a sentence of the form ‘S is P’, instead of thinking

of the ‘is’ as a copula and the ‘P’ as a predicate, he thinks of the ‘is’ as a verb

and the ‘P’ as analogous to an adverb. A person who Wrst runs fast and then

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runs slowly is running all the time. Similarly, for Parmenides, stuV which is

Wrst water and then air goes on be-ing all the time. Change is never from

not-being to being, or vice versa; the most there can ever be is variation of

being.

Interpreting Parmenides in this way helps us to understand how he

draws some very remarkable conclusions from the theses of the universal-

ity of Being and the inconceivability of Unbeing.

One road there is, signposted in this wise:

Being was never born and never dies.

Four-square, unmoved, no end it will allow.

It never was, nor will be; all is now,

One and continuous. How could it be born

Or whence could it be grown? Unbeing?—No—

That mayn’t be said or thought; we cannot go

So far ev’n to deny it is. What need,

Early or late, could Being from Unbeing seed?

Thus it must altogether be or not.

(DK 28 B8. 1–11)

From the principle ‘Nothing can come from nothing’ many philosophers

of diVerent persuasions have drawn the conclusion that the world must

always have existed. Other philosophers, too, have oVered as a supporting

argument that there could be no suYcient reason for a world to come into

existence at one m oment rather than another, earlier or later. But Par-

menides’ claim that Being has no beginning and no end takes a much more

sweeping form. Being is not only everlasting , it is not subject to change

(‘four-square, unmoved’) or even to the passage of time (it is all now, and

has no past or future). What could diVerentiate past from present and

future? If it is no kind of being, then time is unreal; if it is some kind of

being, then it is all part of Being. Past, present, and future are all one Being.

By similar arguments Parmenides seeks to show that Being is undivided.

What could separate Being from Being? Being? In that case there is no

division, but continuous Being. Unbeing? In that case any division is unreal

(DK 28 B8. 22–5). We might expect him to argue in a parallel fashion that

Being is unlimited. What could set limits to Being? Unbeing cannot do

anything to anything; and if we imagine that Being is limited by Being,

then Being has not yet reached its limits. Some of Parmenides’ followers

argued thus (Aristotle, GC 1.8. 325a15), but this is not how Parmenides

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himself seems to have seen matters. When he comes to sum up his

teaching, starting from premisses that are by now familiar he reaches a

rather startling conclusion.

To think a thing’s to think it is, no less.

Apart from Being, whate’er we may express

Thought does not reach. Naught is or will be

Beyond Being’s bounds, since Destiny’s decree

Fetters it whole and still. All things are names

Which the credulity of mortals frames—

Birth and destruction, being all or none,

Changes of place, and colours come and gone.

But since a bound is set embracing all

Its shape’s well rounded like a perfect ball.

(DK 28 B8, 34–43)

It is not at all clear how the concept of the universe as a perfect sphere is

either coherent in itself or reconcilable with the rest of Parmenides’

teaching. However that may be, there is a more pressing question. If this

is the nature of Being, uniform, unchanging, immobile, and timeless, what

are we to make of the multiplicity of changing properties that we normally

attribute to items in the world on the basis of sense-experience? These, for

Parmenides, belong to the Way of Seeming. If we want to follow the Way of

Truth, we must keep our minds Wxed on Being.

While Parmenides and his disciples, in Greek Italy, were stressing that

only what is utterly stable is real, Heraclitus, across the seas in Greek Asia,

was stressing that what is real is in total Xux. Heraclitus was given to

speaking in riddles: to express his philosophy of universal change he used

both Wre and water as images. The world is an ever-living Wre, now Xaring

up, now dying down; Wre is the c urrency into which everything can be

converted just as gold and goods are exchanged for each other (DK 22 B30,

B90). But the world is also an ever-Xowing river. If you step into a river, you

cannot put your feet twice into the same water. Getting rather carried

away by his metaphor, Heraclitus went on to say—if Plato reports him

honestly—that you cannot step twice into the same river (Cra. 402a).

However that may be, he seems undoubtedly to have claimed that all

things are in motion all of the time (Aristotle, Ph. 8. 3. 253b9). If we do not

notice this, it is because of the defects of our senses. For Heraclitus, then, it

is change that is the Way of Truth, and stability that is the Way of Seeming.

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Plato’s Ideas and their Troubles

Parmenides and Heraclitus laid out a battleWeld for centuries of philosoph-

ical warfare. Much of Plato’s most energetic philosophizing was devoted to

the task of reconciling, or disarming, these two champions. One of his

characters tells us that the true philosopher must refuse to accept either

the doctrine that all reality is changeless, or the doctrine that reality is

everywhere changing. ‘Like a child who wants to have his cake and eat it he

must say that Being, the sum of all, is both at once—all that is unchange-

able, and all that is in change’ (Sph. 249c–d).

Aristotle tells us that Plato began to philosophize under the inXuence of

Heraclitean ideas, and retained them well on in life (Metaph. A 6. 987a 31–3).

In the Theaetetus Plato oVers a theory of perception that endeavours to

preserve the truth in Heraclitus’ insights without accepting the universal

Xux. We will consider this in Chapter 7, concentrating for the present on

his treatment of Parmenidean problems.

During his life Plato made three systematic attempts to cope with the

metaphysical issues raised by the two giants. The Wrst is the Theory of

Ideas, as presented in the Symposium, Phaedo, and Republic. Very crudely, one

can say that in this phase Plato’s Socrates divided the realm of philosophy

in two, and handed over the intelligible universe of the Ideas to Parmeni-

des, and the perceptible universe of the senses to Heraclitus. In the second

phase Parmenides himself, in the dialogue named after him, is represented

as exposing for Socrates some unacceptable consequences of the Ideal

theory. In the Wnal phase, in the Sophist, a third protagonist, an unnamed

stranger from Elea, leads us to disown not only Parmenides and Heraclitus,

but also Plato’s own Theory of Ideas, in favour of an elaborate solution that

will supersede all three and enable us to have our metaphysical cake

and eat it.

As we have seen, the Ideas, as represented in the early middle dialogues,

belong in an eternal world that is as unchanging as the Being revealed by

Parmenides’ way of Truth. The entities that inhabit the empirical world, on

the other hand, are in a Heraclitean Xux, constantly Xitting between being

and non-being. Plato is not, however, even-handed between the two

protagonists: the Parmenidean world is far superior to the Heraclitean

one; the unchanging world of Ideas is more real, and contains more

truth, than the Xickering world of experience. Only intellectual insight

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Plato, here idealized in a head from the Vatican, had a gift almost unique among

philosophers for criticizing and revizing his own most cherished ideas

into Ideas gives knowledge; the senses can provide nothing better than true

belief.

But while the realm of the Ideas is unchanging, it is not uniform or

homogeneous like Parmenides’ Being. Being is undiVerentiated and single,

whereas there are many diVerent Ideas in some kind of relation to each

other. They appear to be hierarchically ordered, under the Idea of Good,

which appears to trump any notion of Being (Rep. 6. 509b). No doubt the

other Ideas owe it to the Idea of Good that they are Ideas at all: a bed is a

Perfect or Ideal Bed because it participates in Perfection and is the best

possible bed. But the relations between the diVerent subordinate ideas are

not at all spelt out; there is certainly no suggestion that they are all one

with each other in some sublime Parmenidean sphere.

It is not surprising, then, that when Plato comes to place a critical

evaluation of the Theory of Ideas in the mouth of Parmenides, it is the

One, the Idea of Unity, that is the focus of discussion.

The Parmenides is the most diYcult of Plato’s dialogues to interpret, and

many scholars have confessed themselves baZed by it. It falls into two

parts. The Wrst part resem bles one of the earlier Socratic dialog ues in which

a self-styled expert is shown to be unqualiWed to hold forth on the topic of

his alleged expertise. The startling thing is that the usual roles a re reversed.

Instead of the inquiring Socrates puncturing the pretensions of some

famous sophist, it is the young Socrates himself who is put to the question,

and the topic of the quiz from which he emerges humiliated is none other

than the Theory of Ideas. Parmenides, who is the successful inquisitor, tells

Socrates that he is insuYciently trained in dialectic, and needs further

exercise. The second part of the dialogue purports to illustrate the kind of

exercise that Socrates needs. Starting from a pair of hypotheses about One

and Being, which appear between them to exhaust the possibilities, Par-

menides shows by a series of tight but often implausible arguments that

whichever arm of the contradiction we accept we are led to wholly

unpalatable conclusions.

Scholars disagree about both the nature of each of the two parts and

their relation to each other. Are the criticisms of the Ideas in the Wrst part

regarded by Plato as seriously damaging to his theory? If so, does he have a

remedy to propose, or is he just candidly confessing his perplexity? Are the

proofs in the second part meant as jokes or as serious arguments? If the

latter, did Plato mean us to detect fallacies in them, or did he himself

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