Parmenides (c. 485 BCE) was a Greek
philosopher from the colony of Elea in southern Italy. He is known as the
founder of the Eleatic School of philosophy which taught a strict Monistic view
of reality. Philosophical Monism is the belief that all of the sensible world
is of one, basic, substance and being, un-created and indestructible. According to the ancient writer Diogenes
Laertius (c. 200 CE), Parmenides was a student of Xenophanes of Colophon (who
some claim as the founder of the Eleatic School) but left his master’s
discipline to pursue his own vision. Even so, the stamp of Xenophanes’
teachings can be seen in the work of Parmenides in that both assert that the
things in life which one thinks one understands may be quite different than
they seem to be, especially regarding an understanding of the gods. Xenophon's
insistence on a single deity, who in no way resembled human beings, seems to
have been the basis for Parmenides' claim of a single substance comprising all
of reality. Parmenides was a younger contemporary of Heraclitus who claimed
that all things are constantly in motion and change (that the basic `stuff' of
life is change itself). Parmenides’ thought could not be further removed from
that of Heraclitus in that Parmenides claimed nothing moved, change was an
impossibility, and that human sense perception could not be relied upon for an
apprehension of Truth.
According to Parmenides, “There is a way which
is and a way which is not” (a way of fact, or truth, and a way of opinion about
things) and one must come to an understanding of the way “which is” to
understand the nature of life. Known as the Philosopher of Changeless Being,
Parmenides' insistance on an eternal, single Truth and his repudiation of
relativism and mutability would greatly influence the young philosopher Plato
and, through him, Aristotle (though the latter would interpret Parmenides’
Truth quite differently than his master did). Plato devoted a dialogue to the
man, the Parmenides, in which Parmenides and his student, Zeno, come to Athens
and instruct a young Socrates in philosophical wisdom. This is quite an homage
to the thought of Parmenides in that, in most dialogues, Plato presents
Socrates as the wise questioner who needs no instruction from anyone. While
Parmenides was an older contemporary of Socrates, it is doubtful the two men
ever met and Plato's dialogue is considered an idealized account of the
philosopher (though accurate in portraying his philosophy). Zeno of Elea was
Parmenides' most famous student and wrote forty paradoxes in defense of
Parmenides’ claim that change – and even motion – were illusions which one must
disregard in order to know the nature of oneself and that of the universe.
Nothing is capable of inherently
changing in any significant fashion because the very substance of reality is
unchangeable and 'nothingness' cannot be comprehended.
Zeno's work was intended to clarify
and defend Parmenides' statements, such as, "There is not, nor will there
be, anything other than what is since indeed Destiny has fettered it to remain
whole and immovable. Therefore those things which mortals have established,
believing them to be true, will be mere names: "'coming into being and
passing away,' 'being and not being,' 'change of place'..."(Robinson,
116). In other words, Parmenides argues that we may think the world we live in
is comprised of multiples but, in reality, it is One. Nothing is capable of
inherently changing in any significant fashion because the very substance of
reality is unchangeable and 'nothingness' cannot be comprehended.
Even so, it seems that Parmenides'
ideas themselves were hard to comprehend for his listeners, necessitating
Zeno's mathematical paradoxes. Parmenides' main point, however, was simply that
nothing could come from nothing and that `being' must have always existed. He
writes:
There is left but this single path
to tell thee of: namely, that being is. And on this path there are many proofs
that being is without beginning and indestructible; it is universal, existing
alone, immovable and without end; nor ever was it nor will it be, since it now
is, all together, one, and continuous. For what generating of it wilt thou seek
out? From what did it grow, and how? I will not permit thee to say or to think
that it came from not-being; for it is impossible to think or to say that
not-being is.
What would then have stirred it into activity that it should
arise from not-being later rather than earlier? So it is necessary that being
either is absolutely or is not. Nor will the force of the argument permit that
anything spring from being except being itself. Therefore justice does not
slacken her fetters to permit generation or destruction, but holds being firm. (Fairbanks, 93)
Simply put, his argument is that
since `something' cannot come from `nothing' then `something' must have always
existed in order to produce the sensible world. This world we perceive, then,
is of one substance - that same substance from which it came - and we who
inhabit it share in this same unity of substance. Therefore, if it should
appear that a person is born from `nowhere' or that one dies and goes somewhere
else, both of these perceptions must be wrong since that which is now can never
have been `not' nor can it ever `not be'. In this, Parmenides may be developing
ideas from the earlier philosopher Pythagoras (c. 571-c.497 BCE) who claimed
the soul is immortal and returns to the sensible world repeatedly through
reincarnation. If so, however, Parmenides very radically departed from
Pythagorean thought which allows that there is plurality present in our
reality.
To Parmenides, and his disciples of the Eleatic School, such a claim
would be evidence of belief in the senses which, they insisted, could never be
trusted to reveal the truth. The Eleatic principle that all is one, and
unchanging, exerted considerable influence on later philosophers and schools of
thought. Besides Plato (who, in addition to the dialogue Parmenides also
addressed Eleatic concepts in his dialogues of the Sophist and the Statesman)
the famous Sophist Gorgias employed Eleatic reasoning and principles in his
work as Aristotle would also do later, principally in his Metaphysics.
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