By Daniel Adler.
The presocratic philosopher Parmenides (born 515 BCE) is best known as the discoverer of logic and the originator of metaphysics. He lived so long ago that we only have fragments of a poem he left us—an inductive proof that all is One, unchanging Being. In his time, Parmenides was not the only one concerned with such issues, but he was so influential that decades after his death Plato wrote a dialogue called Parmenides. In it, Plato has Parmenides prove that both Non-being and Being exist. Because Plato wrote so much and Parmenides wrote so little, and because this happened so long ago, subsequent philosophers have struggled to come to a consensus about what Plato is doing here. They tend to understand Parmenides as the extreme logician Plato represents. In maintaining this tradition, however, we gloss over the at-times enigmatic but always profound wisdom Parmenides left us, as well as Plato’s subtle humor.
Parmenides lived in a Greek colony in Southern Italy called Velia, or Elia, about thirty miles south of Paestum, where today one could find some of the world’s best-preserved Greek temples. Like some of the other famous early Greek philosophers—Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Thales—Parmenides traced his lineage to Anatolia, in Western Turkey. Parmenides’s tribe of Anatolian Greeks were called Phocaeans and were forced to leave their native land because of a Persian invasion. They brought with them to Italy a cult of Apollo, and Parmenides was one of their oracles.
In Parmenides’s poem his narrator is an initiate, a figure central to the mysterio-sophism of Ancient Greek religions—an individual coming to understand the paradoxes embodied in “Truth.” He is conveyed by the daughters of the sun to the Hall of Night to learn what secrets the goddess can teach him. She is never named, but the Greeks of Parmenides’s time would have recognized the goddess as Persephone, queen of the underworld. In the sixth century BCE, the ancient myths and epics of Homer had become so engrained in Greek consciousness that they were worn into triteness, ripe for punning, or what we might think of as irony, although that term did not yet exist. So when Parmenides’s goddess refers to mortals as two-headed, she is also alluding to the Greek crossroads, the forked path which leads to the underworld, which we encounter after death, and which was associated with tricksters, ambiguity and danger (Kingsley, 99-101).
The path of persuasion is and cannot not be, (for truth accompanies it) while the other is “that it is not and that it must not be…a trail of utter ignorance” (Barnes 80). The goddess describes the differences between Being and Non-being: any division into parts of Being requires a limitation or Non-being which, because this would violate the premise of Being, is an illusion. This induction proves that you can’t choose Non-being: “For you could not know that-which-is-not (it can’t be done), nor speak of it” (Sedley, 116). The only true option is to follow Being, a path immediate and spontaneous, which cannot not be and so simply is. In this, everything is One—“So it is that creation has been extinguished, and of destruction there is not a word to be heard” (Kingsley, 164).
Besides being a poet and philosopher, Parmenides was also a healer and an oracle. He led young men in initiation ceremonies of deep meditation for the cult of Apollo, who had yet to become the god of reason and light and sun but was considered a god of healing and revelation. He lived in the underworld and was closer to the Hindu god Shiva—a destroyer. It’s difficult for us to imagine how a god can acquire new traits. To focalize this idea through a more contemporary point of view, we can consider how a philosopher’s ideas can be reinterpreted to create hierarchies and oppositions.
One of the greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Martin Heidegger, addresses this in his Introduction to Metaphysics when he describes the eternal debate between scholars over Being and becoming. While the philosophical/rhetorical tradition suggests that this debate begins with Parmenides representing the One in one corner and Heraclitus in the other for the Many, Heidegger says that these two philosophers are essentially saying the same thing:
One finds nothing out of order in the occurrence of such oppositions—here Being, there becoming—because they confirm a rule that applies from the inception of philosophy onward, a rule that supposedly spans its entire history, namely that when one philosopher says A, the other says B, but when the latter says A, then the former says B. Of course, if someone asserts the opposite, that in the history of philosophy all thinkers have at bottom said the same thing, then this is taken as yet another outlandish supposition on everyday common sense. What use, then, is the multifaceted and complex history of Western philosophy, if they all say the same thing anyway? Then one philosophy would be enough. Everything has always already been said. And yet this “same” possesses as its inner truth, the inexhaustible wealth of what is one every day as if that day were its first. Heraclitus, to whom one ascribes the doctrine of becoming, in stark contrast to Parmenides, in truth says the same thing as Parmenides. He would not be one of the greatest of the Greeks if he said anything else. One simply must not interpret his doctrine of becoming according to the notions of a nineteenth-[or twenty-first-]century Darwinist (106-7).
There exists a sameness of inner truth between all great philosophers. When Heidegger describes that “inexhaustible wealth of what is one every day as if that day were its first,” he is describing the same Truth that Parmenides’s initiate hears from his goddess. True Being is One because it stands outside of time, every day, as if that day were its first—it is action that is completely new, because it must Be, and it is not overwhelmed or fragmented by thought or doubt.
And yet when Parmenides’s initiate says, “It is all the same to me where I start from; for I shall come back there again” (ibid., 122), I wonder: why travel at all?
In Parmenides’s time, Poseidonia was the boundary between Magna Grecia—the Greek colony of Italy—and the native Italian tribes: Etruscans and Lucanians. When I visited Paestum, I was staying at my ex’s family’s house, half an hour south of Naples, at the base of Vesuvius.
A few days earlier, G and I had arrived in Naples, where snowflakes fell for the first time in thirty-four years. We celebrated Christmas with the rest of her family, who all lived nearby, and a few days later on the 27th of December, a date I love for how it is so pregnant with the New Year, we drove to Paestum to see the temples.
The Doric columns of three temples remained, and the second Temple of Hera even had its friezes and metopes intact. Mosaic floors and marble cisterns were the last extant riches of an extinct empire. On the site’s western periphery, uneven Greek flagstones led to smaller floor plans spaced more closely together, a reminder of the eternal disparity between rich and poor.
I imagined how in Parmenides’s time, these temples were full of statuary and gold. How before that, troglodytes traded pink seashells for bronze amongst the turquoise water, high cliffs, the laurels and junipers and myrtles and sun. In the eighteenth century, Grand Touring gentlemen found these mossy remains after they “discovered” Pompeii. They were shocked to see peasants living among the ruins. How might I have lived here with G during those intervening centuries—salt-spray crusting my hair as I led a flock of sheep with my staff of olivewood? Did swine encircle us while we slept? Did sheepskins warm us during even colder December mornings?
In the gift shop, G bought a deckle-edged reproduction of a Piranesi etching of rustics playing among the fallen stones of the second Temple of Hera. At first, I thought it silly—I disrespected reproductions—but later, when she framed it and hung it in our kitchen, I looked upon the print fondly. Before I left New York, G said I should keep it, so I sent it to my family home, where today it hangs in my childhood bedroom.
From Paestum we drove south, down a bone-straight road cleared by Romans, to a forked road. We took the right path to a guest house owned by G’s uncle’s friend. Zio Giuseppe was a little bald man in his seventies, ruddy, fair, blue-eyed—an uncle by marriage, of Norman descent. We proceeded to eat one of the best meals I’ve ever had: caprese salad with local Campanian buffalo mozzarella; linguine con vongole—clams mixed in a pasta sauce of olive oil and white wine—and spada, swordfish stuck with cloves and drizzled in lemon and olive oil.
When we returned to G’s family’s village, I thought of A Farewell to Arms as we drank Lacrima christi, a wine made from grapes grown in the rich soil of Vesuvius, in G’s own backyard. A lemon the size of my calf lay on the kitchen table. We perambulated at sunset. Hand-talking, heavy-browed ladies strung laundry outside yellow apartments. We received curious looks for speaking English as we strode along the seashore’s black sands and gazed into the sea.
For many modern historians, scholars and philosophers, Parmenides’s logical thought, or logos, is the precondition to “truth.” The twentieth century historian J.P. Vernant, for example, claims that Parmenides’s logos of non-contradiction—that being is and non-being is not—“finalizes the break with the old logic of myth” (365). Yet in Parmenides’s time, the word logos meant much more than logic. It connoted a force closer to the Zen understanding of The Way or Tao, of skillfully or flexibly responding to what is.
By the fourth century BCE, however, the word logos had taken on the primary denotations of “reason,” and “logical argument,” which in Parmenides’s time had only been implied as ways we humans can respond to the constant challenges of existence. Increasingly, myths were largely considered children’s stories, and the knowledge found in Homer’s epics was dubious. The Ionic alphabet had become standard in Athens and writing had proliferated. Scores of itinerant teachers, or sophists, now recorded their practices in text and competed for wealthy, truth-seeking students by demonstrating their mental gymnastics in cities across Greece. The sophist Gorgias, for example, a contemporary of Plato’s, wrote a tract “On Not-Being,” which some consider a parody of Parmenides’s famous poem, as well as “A Defense of Helen,” for starting the Trojan War. Much ink has been spilled about the satiric nature of these treatises, but whatever their original intent, by this decadent era, esoteric meditation rituals were no longer compulsory for those seeking wisdom or truth—as long as they could afford the presence of a teacher. Truth could be studied and interpreted through disseminated texts.
While Plato’s teacher Socrates never wrote anything, Plato wrote a lot. His first dialogues, Apology and Phaedo, were written in the 390s, and distinguished Socrates from the sophists by mythologizing him and presenting his famous dialectical method of questioning. By Plato’s later years, around the time he wrote the dialogues Sophist and Parmenides, he had developed new tactics—less of Socrates’ self-parody, and further elucidation of his own theory of forms. It’s clear, from dialogues such as Theatetus, that Plato admires Parmenides based on how Socrates describes him as, “…venerable and awful, as in Homeric language he may be called;—him I should be ashamed to approach in a spirit unworthy of him. I met him when he was an old man and I was a mere youth, and he appeared to me to have a glorious depth of mind.” It seems that here Socrates alludes to the events of Parmenides, in which Socrates as a young man argues with Parmenides, who after putting pressure on young Socrates’ theories, works through deduction to refute his own ideas about the One and Being and concludes that Non-being can exist.
At the end of Parmenides, after Parmenides has proved that Non-being is, he adds: “…that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.” It is as if we are back where we started before the dialogue began. Plato seems conscious of how sophistic logic can be used to validate anything’s opposite. From a certain perspective, of course one can repudiate Socrates’s theory of forms. Parmenides can even repudiate himself. Perhaps it is this capacity for self-critique that Plato works to show as a shared “sameness” between himself and his character Parmenides.
But we must remember that by setting the dialogue Parmenides a hundred years in the past and writing it at a time when Socrates had already been dead for a generation—perhaps in the 370s—Parmenides is a character in Plato’s historical fiction. During this time the boundary between history and fiction was very tenuous—in fact, the idea of genre only emerged after Plato, with his student Aristotle. So while we have no proof that Socrates and Parmenides ever met, and while these dialogues may tempt us to believe they did, we should recognize that Plato is often at his most serious when he seems to be joking, and joking when he is at his most serious—a tendency characteristic of Socratic irony. Plato’s dialogues might have been stories read at intellectual drinking games, as fodder for initiates scorned by a society concerned with beauty and riches. But whatever Plato’s intent regarding Parmenides’s negation of Socrates’s and his own theories, it’s clear that through Socrates Plato represents himself as the inheritor of the Parmenidean tradition.
The early 20th century philosopher Albert Whitehead famously characterized the European philosophical tradition as a series of footnotes to Plato. While early philosophy, such as that found in Parmenides’s poem, suggests a “sameness” of Being which exists outside of time and logic, Heidegger points out that after Plato and really with Aristotle, Being becomes associated with logic and later, “…the mere securing of thought…” (246). To read Parmenides unironically is to consider Being as logic, as categories, as “…ways of saying and being said” (247). But Plato’s special brand of irony—almost all of the examples of Socratic irony we have were written by Plato—and all the time and scholarship between us and him make it impossible to know how much fiction is in his Parmenides. While its flawless logic shows Parmenides at his best—that is, as not-Parmenides—perhaps by Plato’s decadent era, Being required new myths, new ways of envisioning the past, and this dialogue is yet another example of Plato’s unique form of myth-making.
So now, as I conclude this piece of writing, I consider how it might be read as history, philosophy, or essay. I think of how we name and categorize, strip art of its aura so it becomes what we want it to Be. How this text is not Non-being or going backwards but is revealed by my goddess when I stare out at a gibbous moon, pondering the history of a moment stretched into eternity. Or when I study the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, or remember the crinkled skin around Zio Giuseppe’s blue eyes when he smiled. Or the Piranesi print above my dresser.
References
Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. Yale University Press: New Haven, 2014.
Kingsley, Peter. Reality. The Golden Sufi Center. 2003.
Michelini, Ann N. “Plato’s Socratic Mask.” Plato as Author: The Rhetoric of Philosophy, edited by Ann N. Michelini, Koninklijke Brill NV, 2003, pp. 45–65.
Plato. Parmenides oll.libertyfund.org/titles/plato-dialogues-vol-4-parmenides-theaetetus-sophist-statesman-philebus.
–Sophist. oll.libertyfund.org/titles/plato-dialogues-vol-4-parmenides-theaetetus-sophist-statesman-philebus.
–Theatetus. oll.libertyfund.org/titles/plato-dialogues-vol-4-parmenides-theaetetus-sophist-statesman-philebus.
Sedley, David. “Parmenides and Melissus.” The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, edited by A. A. Long, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 113–133.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre. Myth and Thought Among the Greeks. Translated by Routledge Paul and Kegan Paul, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1983.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Adler was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Portland. He’s studied at NYU, Edinburgh University, and University of South Carolina, where he earned an MFA in Fiction. His work has most recently appeared in Identity Theory, Bull and Stirring. He’s a PhD student in English Literature at University of Nevada, Reno.
