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2 ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL SCHOOLS |
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One of the principal schools of ancient
Pre-Socratic philosophy was Eleaticism, so called from its seat in the Greek
colony of Elea (or Velia) in southern Italy. This school, which flourished in
the 5th century BC, was distinguished by its radical monism;
i.e., its doctrine of the
One, according to which all that exists (or is really true) is a static
plenum of Being as such, and nothing exists that
stands either in contrast or in contradiction to Being. Thus, all
differentiation, motion, and change must be illusory. This monism is also
reflected in its view that existence, thought, and expression coalesce into one. |
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The sources for the study of Eleaticism
are both archaeological and literary. Archaeologists have ascertained that, at
the time of Parmenides, the Rationalist who founded the school, Elea
was a large town with many temples, a harbour, and a girdle of walls several
miles long. They have also unearthed a site presumed to be that of the medical
school that Parmenides founded and an inscription bearing Parmenides' name. |
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The literary sources consist of
fragments preserved by later classical authors--19 from Parmenides, four from
his pupil Zeno, renowned for his paradoxes of
motion, and 10 from another pupil, Melissus, an
admiral of Samos--of which all but three from Parmenides and two from Melissus
are 10 lines or less in length. The interpretation is also affected by the
weight of scholarly opinion that now holds (as against Karl Reinhardt, an early
20th-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 Skeptic Sextus Empiricus
distorted Parmenides' thinking into problems of epistemology (theory of
knowledge), because this is what his Skeptical eye saw in his writings. |
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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. |
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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 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. (see
also Ionian school) |
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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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For a long time Xenophanes
of Colophon, a religious thinker and rhapsode of the 6th-5th century BC, 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." |
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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. |
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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 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. |
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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. |
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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 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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 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. |
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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. |
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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 bushel of corn emptied upon the floor makes a noise,
each grain must likewise make a noise, but in fact this does not happen. |
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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. (see
also dichotomy,
reductio ad absurdum) |
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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. (see also Achilles paradox) |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 Parmenides' coalescence of Being and
thought and expression to Non-Being instead of to Being and thus signalled the
decline of Eleaticism. |
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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. |
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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. |
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(G.C./L.H.St.) |
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