Ridling Zaine. Philosophy: Then and Now. A look back at 26 centuries of thought

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Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

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century philologist and historian of philosophy) that Parmenides reacted to

Heracleitus and not vice versa. Moreover, the biases of the citing authors must

be weighed. Heracleitans and Parmenideans of the second generation, for

example, saw their masters, simplistically, only as the prophets of movement

and immobility; and the ancient sceptic Sextus Empiricus distorted

Parmenides’ thinking into problems of epistemology (theory of knowledge),

because this is what his sceptical eye saw in his writings.

The Eleatic School Vis-À-Vis Rival Movements

Each member of the Eleatic school espoused a distinctive variety of

Eleaticism: Parmenides pursued a direct and logical course of thought and

viewed Being as finite and timeless; Zeno concurred in Parmenides’ doctrines

but employed the indirect methods of reductio ad absurdum and infinite

regress (see below The paradoxes of Zeno); and Melissus modified the

doctrines, viewing Being as infinitely extensive and eternally temporal. A

fourth thinker, the Sicilian Sophist Gorgias of Leontini, though not an

adherent to Eleaticism, employed the methods of the Eleatic Zeno to defend

its opposite – a nihilism that affirmed Non-Being instead of Being.

Eleaticism represents a reaction against several tendencies of thought.

Methodologically, it spurned the empirical (observational) approach taken by

earlier cosmologists, such as the 6th-century Milesians Thales and

Anaximenes, who discerned ultimate reality in water and in air (or breath),

respectively, for these substances are materializations of Being – analogous to

the materialization that occurs in Pythagoreanism in passing from an abstract

line or plane or three-dimensional form to a solid perceptible body – rather

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than Being itself; or, at best (as some scholars hold), the substances are

mythological representations of Being. The Eleatics, on the contrary, ignoring

perceptual appearances, pursued a rationalistic – i.e., a strictly abstract and

logical – approach and thus found reality in the all-encompassing, static unity

and fullness of Being and in this alone. Thus Parmenides was the father of

pure ontology.

Ontologically – in its view of the nature of Being – the Eleatic school,

holding to what Parmenides called the “way of truth” (“what is”), stood

opposed to two other “ways of research” that were then current: first, to the

“way of opinion” (or seeming; later developed at length by Plato in the

Sophist), which held that a being comprises or is defined not only by what it is

but also by what it is not – i.e., by its contrast with other things; and, second,

to a way recognizable as that of Heracleitus, a caustic and often cryptic

philosopher then living in Ephesus, who maintained – still more radically –

that the essence of a being lies in part in its involvement in, or even its identity

with, its opposite. Finally, as an aspect of Parmenides’ opposition to the way

of opinion, he was in reaction also against Anaximander, another Milesian

scientist and philosopher. Though Anaximander’s basic principle, the apeiron

(“boundless”), was duly abstract and not a part of the world itself (as were

water and air), his philosophy depended, nonetheless, upon the world’s

contrast with the infinite apeiron, from which all things come and to which

they return “in accordance with the ordinance of Time.” This contrast –

which, in a Pythagorean version, envisioned the world as breathing in

voidness from the infinite outer breath in order to keep things apart or discrete

– thus spawned a “many” that contradicts the Eleatic One.

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The Rigorous Ontologism of Parmenides and Melissus

For a long time Xenophanes of Colophon, a religious thinker and

rhapsode of the 6th-5th century BCE, was considered the founder of the

Eleatic school and Parmenides’ mentor. This ancient claim, however, has been

successfully criticized by Reinhardt. It is even possible that, on the contrary,

Xenophanes was an older pupil of Parmenides. In any case, his monistic view

of a cosmic God, whom he may have equated pantheistically with Being itself,

was Eleatic in its contention that God is one and ungenerated, that his seeing,

thinking, and hearing are equally all-pervading (i.e., he is not a composite),

and that he “always remains in the same place, not moving at all.”

Parmenides’ poem Peri physeos (“On Nature”) is divided into three

parts: (1) a proem (preface), in which his chariot ride through the heavens to

the very seat of the goddess Aletheia (Truth) is described and their initial

conversation is related, in which she announces that he is “to learn all things,

both the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth and also what seems to mortals,

in which is no true conviction”; (2) the “Way of Truth,” the main part, in

which the real and unique Being is depicted; and (3) the “Way of Opinion” (or

Seeming), in which the empirical world – i.e., the single things as they appear

every day to every man – is presented.

Logical and Linguistic Approach

Thus, at the very heart of Parmenides’ philosophy lies the distinction

made by the goddess (in Fragment 2) between the two “ways of research.” As

noted earlier, the first is the antinomy (or paradox) of those who think and say

that everything is Being and who shun all assertions of Non-Being; and the

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second is that of those who think and say that something is in a way and is not

in another way – that a book is a book, for example, and not a table. There is,

however, also a third way that is far more erroneous and fallacious than the

second: that of Heracleitus, who acknowledged, just as Parmenides did, the

ontological antinomy of is and is not but reversed it, holding that the real way

of understanding things is to grasp their essential contradiction, their intrinsic

opposition to everything else. In this view, one must say that to be a table is

also not to be just a table and that to be a chair is not to be just a chair but to

be also a table, because not only opposite things but also things that are

merely different are bound to each other. Thus, life is death to Heracleitus,

death is life, and justice would be meaningless if it had no injustice to defeat.

In essence, then, the possible ways are three: (1) that of renouncing all

contradictions whatsoever (truth); (2) that of contradicting oneself relatively

(seeming); and (3) that of contradicting oneself completely and absolutely

(Heracleitus). And Eleaticism chose the first, the absolutely noncontradictory

way that says that only what is, Being, is really true.

Not-Being, in fact, can neither be recognized nor expressed, for, as

Parmenides then added, “for the same thing can be thought and can exist.”

And – if one may guess at the words (now lost) that probably followed –

what-is-not you can neither know nor say; thus, to think is indeed the same as

to say that what you think is. To this coalescence of existing reality and the

intellectual grasping of it, Parmenides also added the linguistic

communication of such knowledge. Each way of research, in fact, is at the

same time a way of speculation and a way of diction; i.e., both a way of

searching for truth with one’s mental eyes and of expressing it in words. The

primal source of the Eleatic philosophy thus lies in the archaic sense of

language, according to which one cannot pronounce “yes” and “no” without

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deciding about the reality or unreality of the objects of the statements. Thus,

“yes,” or “is,” becomes the name of the truth; and “no,” or “it is not,”

becomes that of its opposite.

This Eleatic principle may be illustrated by a passage from Aeschylus, a

leading Greek dramatist, who, in his Hepta epi Thebais (Eng. trans., Seven

Against Thebes), judged it very appropriate that Helen would have destroyed

Troy, because her name – naïvely derived from helein (“destroy”) and naus

(“ship”) – marked her as a destroyer of ships. Here nomen est omen: the

language is not merely a symbol; it corresponds to reality in its very structure.

Thus, the Eleatic could not imagine a truth that is only expressible but not

thinkable nor one that is only thinkable but not expressible.

Monistic Theory of Being

From the premise of the essential coalescence of language and reality

follows Parmenides’ theory of Being, which comprises the heart of his

philosophy. The only true reality is Eon – pure, eternal, immutable, and

indestructible Being, without any other qualification. Its characterizations can

be only negative, expressions of exclusions, with no pretense of attributing

some special quality to the reality of which one speaks.

In Fragment 8, verse 5, Parmenides said that the absolute Being “neither

was nor will be, because it is in its wholeness now, and only now.” Thus, its

presence lasts untouched by any variation in time; for no one can find a

genesis for it, either from another being (for it is itself already the totality of

Being) or from a Not-Being (for this does not exist at all).

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Obviously, this Parmenidean conception of the eternal presence of the

Being conflicts with Melissus’ idea of the perpetual continuation of the Being

in the past, in the present, and in the future. Thus, if Eleaticism had been

founded by Melissus, no one could have really understood its actual doctrine.

One could suspect in it only an aspiration to have things capable of being

really enduring. But even then the theory would hardly be understandable,

because what one wants is not stable things in general; one wants good things

to be firm and stable and bad things to be ephemeral. The perpetual continuity

of existence as espoused by Melissus was despised by Parmenides just

because “will be” and “has been” are not the same as “is.” Only “is” is the

word of the reality – just because it is the right name for the right thinking of

the right Being.

Among the consequences of this Eleatic conception is the rejection of

every change (birth, movement, growth, death) as pertaining only to the

second-rate reality, which is known and expressed through the second “way of

research.” Thus, the true and noncontradictory reality is extraneous to all of

those happenings, great or small, that make the constant stuff of all history.

Secondly, the real Being has no difference, no lack, no variety

whatsoever in itself. Melissus is here the true pupil of Parmenides, who said

that the Eon is so closely connected in itself that “all Being is neighbour of all

Being”: for Melissus developed this theory by the negation of every form of

kenon (“void”): the Being is an absolute plenum just because every lack in its

plentifulness would amount to a presence of some Not-Being.

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The Paradoxes of Zeno

The position of the other great pupil of Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, was

clearly stated in the first part of Plato’s dialogue Parmenides. There Zeno

himself accepted the definition of Socrates, according to which he did not

really propose a philosophy different from that of Parmenides but only tried to

support it by the demonstration that the difficulties resulting from the

pluralistic presupposition of the polla (the multiple beings of man’s daily

experience) were far more severe than those that seemed to be produced by

the Parmenidean reduction of all reality to the single and universal Being.

The arguments by which Zeno upheld his master’s theory of the unique

real Being were aimed at discrediting the opposite beliefs in plurality and

motion. There are several arguments against plurality. First, if things are really

many, everything must be infinitely small and infinitely great – infinitely

small because its least parts must be indivisible and therefore without

extension and infinitely great because any part having extension, in order to

be separated from any other part, needs the intervention of a third part; but

this happens to such a third part, too, and so on ad infinitum.

Very similar is the second argument against plurality: if things are more

than one, they must be numerically both finite and infinite – numerically finite

because they are as many things as they are, neither more nor less, and

numerically infinite because, for any two things to be separate, the

intervention of a third thing is necessary, ad infinitum. In other words, in order

to be two, things must be three, and, in order to be three, they must be five,

and so on. The third argument says: if all-that-is is in space, then space itself

must be in space, and so on ad infinitum. And the fourth argument says: if a

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bushel of corn emptied upon the floor makes a noise, each grain must likewise

make a noise, but in fact this does not happen.

Zeno also developed four arguments against the reality of motion. These

arguments may also be understood (probably more correctly) as proofs per

absurdum of the inconsistency of any presupposed multiplicity of things,

insofar as these things may be proved to be both in motion and not in motion.

The first argument states that a body in motion can reach a given point only

after having traversed half of the distance. But, before traversing half, it must

traverse half of this half, and so on ad infinitum. Consequently, the goal can

never be reached.

The second argument is that of “Achilles and the tortoise.” If in a race

the tortoise has a start on Achilles, Achilles can never reach the tortoise; for,

while Achilles traverses the distance from his starting point to that of the

tortoise, the tortoise will have gone a certain distance, and, while Achilles

traverses this distance, the tortoise goes still further, ad infinitum.

Consequently, Achilles may run indefinitely without overtaking the tortoise.

This argument is fundamentally identical to the previous one, with the only

difference being that here two bodies instead of one are moving.

The third argument is the strongest of them all. It says the following: So

long as anything is in a space equal to itself, it is at rest. Now, an arrow is in a

space equal to itself at every moment of its flight; therefore, even the flying

arrow is at rest all of the time. And the final argument says: Two bodies

moving at equal speed traverse equal spaces in an equal time. But, when two

bodies move at equal speed in opposite directions, one passes the other in half

of the time that a moving body needs to pass a body that is at rest.

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The difficulty with all these arguments is that of really understanding

them in their historical frame, which neither Aristotle – who was mainly

concerned to confute Zeno – nor many modern scholars – who are concerned

with developing new theories for the calculation of infinitesimal quantities –

really tried to do. Moreover, the role of the author of the paradoxes in the

history of Greek philosophy is itself paradoxical, for many of the same

arguments by which Zeno proved the self-contradictory nature of the unity

considered as the smallest element of a pluralistic reality (the Many) were

later similarly used by Gorgias and Plato to demolish the Parmenidean One-

Totality itself.

The Decline of Eleaticism

This problem is also connected with that of the correct interpretation of

the second part of Plato’s Parmenides. Here the discussion to which Zeno

submits the young Socrates is meant as a serious exemplification of the logical

training that Socrates still needs if he wants to make progress in philosophy.

But the result is simply comic – a “fatiguing joke,” according to Plato’s

Parmenides – because Zeno always starts from the mere principles of the pure

Being or the One and arrives at absurd conclusions: everything is shown to be

true as well as false and deducible and not deducible from everything else.

Such dialectical futility had been anticipated by the nihilism of Gorgias,

presented in a work ironically entitled Peri tou me ontos e peri physeos (“On

That Which Is Not, or On Nature”), in which he said (1) that nothing exists;

(2) that if anything exists, it is incomprehensible; and (3) that if it is

comprehensible, it is incommunicable – and in so doing he applied

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Parmenides’ coalescence of Being and thought and expression to Non-Being

instead of to Being and thus signalled the decline of Eleaticism.

The serious discussion and criticism of the Eleatic philosophy, however,

and the positive interpretation of every Non-Being as a heteron (i.e., as a

being characterized only by its difference from “another” being) is neither in

Gorgias nor in the Parmenides but in the Sophist of Plato. There Plato argued

that the antinomy between On and Me-On (Being and Non-Being) does not

really exist, the only real antinomy being that of Tauton and Heteron; i.e.,

only that of a single object of consciousness in its present determination and

all other things from which it is distinguished.

The real story of ancient Eleaticism thus ends with Plato and with

Democritus, who said that Being exists no more than Non-Being, the thing no

more than the no-thing. But many thinkers, and great thinkers at that – from

Aristotle to Kant and from Hegel to Marx – have continued to work or to fight

with the antinomy of Being and Non-Being.

Epicureanism

In a strict sense, Epicureanism is the philosophy taught by Epicurus

(341-270 BCE); in a broad sense, it is a system of ethics embracing every

conception or form of life that can be traced to the principles of his

philosophy. In ancient polemics, as often since, the term was employed with

an even more generic (and clearly erroneous) meaning as the equivalent of

hedonism, the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the chief good. In popular

parlance, Epicureanism thus means devotion to pleasure, comfort, and high

living, with a certain nicety of style.