{"id":111061,"date":"2022-06-27T17:55:35","date_gmt":"2022-06-27T16:55:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=111061"},"modified":"2022-06-27T17:56:09","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T16:56:09","slug":"being-metaphysical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/being-metaphysical\/","title":{"rendered":"Being Metaphysical"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Daniel Adler.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Temple of Athena in Paestum, via the World History Encyclopedia<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u2014an 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<\/em>. In it, Plato has Parmenides prove that both Non-being and<\/em> 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\u2019s subtle humor.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s best-preserved Greek temples. Like some of the other famous early Greek philosophers\u2014Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Thales\u2014Parmenides traced his lineage to Anatolia, in Western Turkey. Parmenides\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In Parmenides\u2019s poem his narrator is an initiate, a figure central to the mysterio-sophism of Ancient Greek religions\u2014an individual coming to understand the paradoxes embodied in \u201cTruth.\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

The path of persuasion is<\/em> and cannot not be, (for truth accompanies it) while the other is \u201cthat it is not and that it must not be\u2026a trail of utter ignorance\u201d (Barnes 80). The goddess describes the differences between Being and Non-being: \u00a0any 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\u2019t choose Non-being: \u201cFor you could not know that-which-is-not (it can\u2019t be done), nor speak <\/em>of it\u201d (Sedley, 116). The only true option is to follow Being, a path immediate and spontaneous, which cannot not<\/em> be and so simply is<\/em>. In this, everything is One\u2014\u201cSo it is that creation has been extinguished, and of destruction there is not a word to be heard\u201d (Kingsley, 164).<\/p>\n

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\u2014a destroyer. It\u2019s 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\u2019s ideas can be reinterpreted to create hierarchies and oppositions.<\/p>\n

One of the greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Martin Heidegger, addresses this in his Introduction to Metaphysics <\/em>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:<\/p>\n

One finds nothing out of order in the occurrence of such oppositions\u2014here Being, there becoming\u2014because 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 <\/em>philosophy would be enough. Everything has always already been said. And yet this \u201csame\u201d 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).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There exists a sameness of inner truth between all great philosophers. When Heidegger describes that \u201cinexhaustible wealth of what is one every day as if that day were its first,\u201d he is describing the same Truth that Parmenides\u2019s initiate hears from his goddess. True Being is One because it stands outside of time, every day, as if that day were its first\u2014it is action that is completely new, because it must Be, and it is not overwhelmed or fragmented by thought or doubt.<\/p>\n

And yet when Parmenides\u2019s initiate says, \u201cIt is all the same to me where I start from; for I shall come back there again\u201d (ibid., 122), I wonder: why travel at all?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In Parmenides\u2019s time, Poseidonia was the boundary between Magna Grecia\u2014the Greek colony of Italy\u2014and the native Italian tribes: Etruscans and Lucanians. When I visited Paestum, I was staying at my ex\u2019s family\u2019s house, half an hour south of Naples, at the base of Vesuvius.<\/p>\n

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<\/sup> of December, a date I love for how it is so pregnant with the New Year, we drove to Paestum to see the temples.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s western periphery, uneven Greek flagstones led to smaller floor plans spaced more closely together, a reminder of the eternal disparity between rich and poor.<\/p>\n

I imagined how in Parmenides\u2019s 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. \u00a0In the eighteenth century, Grand Touring gentlemen found these mossy remains after they \u201cdiscovered\u201d Pompeii. They were shocked to see peasants living among the ruins.\u00a0How might I have lived here with G during those intervening centuries\u2014salt-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?<\/p>\n

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\u2014I disrespected reproductions\u2014but 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s uncle\u2019s friend. Zio Giuseppe was a little bald man in his seventies, ruddy, fair, blue-eyed\u2014an uncle by marriage, of Norman descent. We proceeded to eat one of the best meals I\u2019ve ever had: caprese salad with local Campanian buffalo mozzarella; linguine con vongole<\/em>\u2014clams mixed in a pasta sauce of olive oil and white wine\u2014and spada,<\/em> swordfish stuck with cloves and drizzled in lemon and olive oil.<\/p>\n

When we returned to G\u2019s family\u2019s village, I thought of A Farewell to Arms<\/em> as we drank Lacrima christi<\/em>, a wine made from grapes grown in the rich soil of Vesuvius, in G\u2019s 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\u2019s black sands and gazed into the sea.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For many modern historians, scholars and philosophers, Parmenides\u2019s logical thought, or logos<\/em>, is the precondition to \u201ctruth.\u201d\u00a0 The twentieth century historian J.P. Vernant, for example, claims that Parmenides\u2019s logos<\/em> of non-contradiction\u2014that being is<\/em> and non-being is not<\/em>\u2014\u201cfinalizes the break with the old logic of myth\u201d (365). Yet in Parmenides\u2019s time, the word logos <\/em>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<\/em>.<\/p>\n

By the fourth century BCE, however, the word logos <\/em>had taken on the primary denotations of “reason,\u201d and \u201clogical argument,\u201d which in Parmenides\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s, wrote a tract \u201cOn Not-Being,\u201d which some consider a parody of Parmenides\u2019s famous poem, as well as \u201cA Defense of Helen,\u201d 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\u2014as long as they could afford the presence of a teacher. Truth could be studied and interpreted through disseminated texts.<\/p>\n

While Plato\u2019s teacher Socrates never wrote anything, Plato wrote a lot. His first dialogues, Apology<\/em> and Phaedo<\/em>, were written in the 390s, and distinguished Socrates from the sophists by mythologizing him and presenting his famous dialectical method of questioning. By Plato\u2019s later years, around the time he wrote the dialogues Sophist <\/em>and Parmenides<\/em>, he had developed new tactics\u2014less of Socrates\u2019 self-parody, and further elucidation of his own theory of forms. It\u2019s clear, from dialogues such as Theatetus<\/em>, that Plato admires Parmenides based on how Socrates describes him as, \u201c\u2026venerable and awful, as in Homeric language he may be called;\u2014him 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.\u201d It seems that here Socrates alludes to the events of Parmenides<\/em>, in which Socrates as a young man argues with Parmenides, who after putting pressure on young Socrates\u2019 theories, works through deduction to refute his own ideas about the One and Being and concludes that Non-being can<\/em> exist.<\/p>\n

At the end of Parmenides<\/em>, after Parmenides has proved that Non-being is<\/em>, he adds: \u00a0“…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.\u201d 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\u2019s opposite. From a certain perspective, of course one can repudiate Socrates\u2019s theory of forms. Parmenides can even repudiate himself. Perhaps it is this capacity for self-critique that Plato works to show as a shared \u201csameness\u201d between himself and his character Parmenides.<\/p>\n

But we must remember that by setting the dialogue Parmenides<\/em> a hundred years in the past and writing it at a time when Socrates had already been dead for a generation\u2014perhaps in the 370s\u2014Parmenides is a character in Plato\u2019s historical fiction. \u00a0During this time the boundary between history and fiction was very tenuous\u2014in fact, the idea<\/em> 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\u2014a tendency characteristic of Socratic irony. Plato\u2019s 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\u2019s intent regarding Parmenides\u2019s negation of Socrates\u2019s and his own theories, it\u2019s clear that through Socrates Plato represents himself as the inheritor of the Parmenidean tradition.<\/p>\n

The early 20th<\/sup> 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\u2019s poem, suggests a \u201csameness\u201d 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, \u201c\u2026the mere securing of thought\u2026\u201d (246). To read Parmenides <\/em>unironically is to consider Being as logic, as categories, as \u201c\u2026ways of saying and being said\u201d (247). But Plato\u2019s special brand of irony\u2014almost all of the examples of Socratic irony we have were written by Plato\u2014and all the time and scholarship between us and him make it impossible to know how much fiction is in his Parmenides.<\/em> While its flawless logic shows Parmenides at his best\u2014that is, as not-Parmenides\u2014perhaps by Plato\u2019s decadent era, Being required new myths, new ways of envisioning the past, and this dialogue is yet another example of Plato\u2019s unique form of myth-making.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s blue eyes when he smiled. Or the Piranesi print above my dresser.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n

Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. <\/em>Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. Yale University Press: New Haven, 2014.<\/p>\n

Kingsley, Peter. Reality<\/em>. The Golden Sufi Center. 2003.<\/p>\n

Michelini, Ann N. \u201cPlato’s Socratic Mask.\u201d\u00a0Plato as Author: The Rhetoric of Philosophy<\/em>, edited by Ann N. Michelini, Koninklijke Brill NV, 2003, pp. 45\u201365.<\/p>\n

Plato.\u00a0Parmenides oll.libertyfund.org\/titles\/plato-dialogues-vol-4-parmenides-theaetetus-sophist-statesman-philebus.<\/p>\n

–Sophist<\/em>. oll.libertyfund.org\/titles\/plato-dialogues-vol-4-parmenides-theaetetus-sophist-statesman-philebus.<\/p>\n

–Theatetus. oll.libertyfund.org\/titles\/plato-dialogues-vol-4-parmenides-theaetetus-sophist-statesman-philebus.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sedley, David. \u201cParmenides and Melissus.\u201d\u00a0The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek <\/em>Philosophy<\/em>, edited by A. A. Long, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 113\u2013133.<\/p>\n

Vernant, Jean-Pierre.\u00a0Myth and Thought Among the Greeks<\/em>. Translated by Routledge Paul and Kegan Paul, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1983.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong><\/p>\n

Daniel Adler<\/strong> 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,<\/em> Bull<\/em> and Stirring<\/em>. He’s a PhD student in English Literature at University of Nevada, Reno.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There exists a sameness of inner truth between all great philosophers. When Heidegger describes that \u201cinexhaustible wealth of what is one every day as if that day were its first,\u201d he is describing the same Truth that Parmenides\u2019s initiate hears from his goddess. True Being is One because it stands outside of time, every day, as if that day were its first\u2014it 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\u2019s initiate says, \u201cIt is all the same to me where I start from; for I shall come back there again,” I wonder: why travel at all?<\/p>\n

An essay on Parmenides, Plato, and Being by Daniel Adler<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":111062,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111061"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":111066,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111061\/revisions\/111066"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}