Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 007 - The Road Less Traveled - Parmenides.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Liverhume Trust. Today's episode, The Road Less Travelled, Parmenides, the Father of Metaphysics. The subject of today's episode is arguably the greatest pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides. Since he is often described as the father of metaphysics, I thought I might start out by saying a bit about what metaphysics is. Philosophers tend to see their discipline as being divided up into several related sub-disciplines. Of course there are the parts of philosophy that tell us what to do, ethics and political philosophy. Both the word ethics and the word political come from Greek. In ancient Greek, ethos means custom or character, and politikē means, well, political, because polis means city. The other two main areas of philosophy are epistemology and metaphysics, and guess where these words come from? Yes, ancient Greek. Epistemology is from episteme, meaning knowledge, and so epistemology is the study of knowledge. For instance, epistemologists want to know what the difference is between knowledge and mere belief, or whether it is possible to know anything at all. Metaphysics is a bit stranger in its etymology. It really means after physics, and many later ancient and medieval philosophers took it that metaphysics is quite literally the discipline one studies after studying physics. You graduate from studying the physical world to studying the metaphysical world of immaterial things like God. Another possible derivation for the word is that Aristotle's book on metaphysics came to be called that because it was studied or just placed on the shelf after his books about physics. In any case, the science of metaphysics is first explicitly marked out by Aristotle and his book of that title, even though it's not a title he gave it. Aristotle calls metaphysics first philosophy, first not because it is the first one you would study, but because it is the most fundamental philosophical inquiry. He tells us that what metaphysics studies is being. In other words, it studies whatever there is, insofar as it is. This means that many of the traditional problems of philosophy are metaphysical problems. Does God exist? Does the human soul exist? Does anything exist apart from physical bodies? Other topics, like the problem of free will, are usually taken to belong to metaphysics even if they also relate to ethics. Parmenides then was the first philosopher who we can say had a clear interest in metaphysics, the study of being, the study of what exists. Certainly, we do find metaphysical ideas in some of the pre-Socratics we've already covered, especially Xenophanes with his criticism of the traditional Greek gods. Partially for that reason, some ancient authors try to convince us that Xenophanes was Parmenides' teacher. Even though this is possible chronologically, we probably shouldn't take it too seriously, since the ancients were always trying to say that every famous philosopher was the student of some other famous philosopher. Of course, Socrates really was Plato's teacher, and Plato really was Aristotle's teacher, and that sort of undermines the point I'm trying to make here, so maybe I'll just say this is the exception that proves the rule, whatever that means, and move on. I just referred to chronology, and that brings us to another thing about Parmenides, which is that he is the first philosopher we'll discuss who was active in the 5th century BC rather than the 6th century BC. Plato wrote a dialogue which depicts an older Parmenides meeting a young Socrates in Athens. That, again, is probably something we shouldn't take too seriously, but unless Plato is really messing with the chronology, it means that Parmenides would have been a teenager when the 5th century began. The 5th century was going to be a time of upheaval for the Greeks, what with the Persians trying to invade mainland Greece on more than one occasion, and the two alliances led by Athens and Sparta facing off in the Peloponnesian War, which raged towards the end of the century. But it was going to be a good time for Greek philosophy and science. Not only did this century see the mature careers of both Parmenides and Socrates, but it was also the period when the Pythagoreans built up their mathematical systems, as we discussed a couple of weeks ago, when Greek medicine really started to get going, and when Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists developed the ambitious cosmologies which will be occupying us over several episodes in the not-too-distant future. This century of philosophy ended with a bang one year late, when Socrates was put to death by the Athenians in 399 BC. By the way, that's a good date to remember, if you're the kind of person who likes to remember dates. 399 BC, the death of Socrates. Given the chaos and war that was gripping mainland Greece, and the domination of Ionia by client kings of the Persians, it's perhaps unsurprising that in the 5th century BC a lot of the philosophical action is further west, in Italy and Sicily, although even these places were dragged into the conflict between Athens and Sparta in the later part of the century. Parmenides and his pupil Zeno were from Elea in Italy, and as we've already seen Italy was also strongly associated with the Pythagoreans. Empedocles was born and active in Sicily. Anaxagoras admittedly is an exception, since he was from Ionia, like most of the philosophers we've looked at thus far. From there, Anaxagoras came to Socrates' city, Athens. In any case, Parmenides was securely identified with his city of Elea, and his followers were often called the Eliatics. When Plato created a character in one of his dialogues to represent the Parmenidean approach to philosophy, he called him the Eliatic stranger. But it's hard to get much stranger than the original philosophy of Parmenides himself. Indeed, it's very striking that when metaphysics really gets going in the hexameter of Hoem written by Parmenides, the first thing it offers is a radical revision of everything you and I think about reality. According to Parmenides, everything that exists is one. Nothing ever changes or moves. Multiplicity of every sort is an illusion, whether it be the multiplicity of different objects, different colours, or different events happening at different times. All this is shown in his poem with a relentless chain of argument, which proceeds on the basis of pure reason rather than observations about the world around us. In this first half of his poem, Parmenides is the original armchair philosopher. He thinks that he can establish the nature of all reality with a purely abstract argument. In this he makes an interesting contrast to Heraclitus, who in some of his fragments emphasizes that he is using his eyes and ears to observe the world and to learn the laws that govern that world. But Parmenides and Heraclitus do agree about one thing. Everyone else apart from them is completely confused, unaware of the nature of reality. Pre-Socratics were rarely short on self-confidence. Perhaps because Parmenides knows that what he has to say is rather flabbergasting, he begins his poem by assuming the trappings of divine revelation. He tells us that he rode a chariot in the company of young maidens up to the gates leading to the paths of night and day. The goddess Justice is persuaded by these maidens to allow Parmenides to ride his chariot on through, and then the goddess congratulates him for finding his way to a road that mortals do not travel. She tells him he will learn two things, first, the truth, and second, the mere opinions of mortal men. These correspond to the two halves of the poem that follows. In the first half we are given the so-called Way of Truth, Parmenides's arguments for the unity of being. In the second part, the so-called Way of Opinion, we get a cosmology very similar to what we find in the earlier Pre-Socratics from Ionia. I'm going to concentrate on the Way of Truth, since that's the famous and more exciting bit, but first let me say something about this division of the poem into two halves. I've been talking about Parmenides as the father of metaphysics, but with this division we can also see him making a major contribution to epistemology. You might remember that Xenophanes already distinguished between mere belief and genuine knowledge. But Parmenides goes much further here by devoting half his poem to knowledge and half to belief. What's interesting is that he spends so much time on the mere beliefs. The second part of the poem, which dealt with cosmology and other issues in natural science, is not preserved as completely as the first part, but it was clearly quite extensive and, as far as we can tell, was offered with serious intent. Parmenides seems to be setting out the beliefs that one should adopt if one isn't capable of grasping the more fundamental underlying truth of the unity of being. We have a fragment which apparently formed a transition from the Way of Truth to the Way of Opinion, and in that fragment he warns us that the Way of Opinion is not to be trusted, it is not as firmly grounded as the Way of Truth. It is still, though, the second best way, because, according to Parmenides, it is the most plausible explanation of things like the heavenly bodies, the human body, these being the sort of topics he tackled in the Way of Opinion. In the Way of Truth, rational argument has shown us that things like heavenly bodies and the human body are mere illusions, yet Parmenides seems to think it is worthwhile to give an account of them. He seems to tell us, if you are going to reject my way of truth and believe something false, then at least leave the falsehoods I offer in the way of opinion. The primary message of Parmenides's poem, though, is that we should not trust the senses, but follow philosophical argument wherever it leads. Let's follow it, then, down the path less travelled, the way of truth. Parmenides begins by making a distinction between two possible paths of inquiry, either is and must be, or isn't and can't be. The second path is rejected, because it involves trying to think about what is not, but non-being is not something we can think or speak about meaningfully. There's actually a third path, mentioned a little later on, which is even worse. According to this path, we say both is and is not. This has the same problem that we would need to grasp non-being, but in addition leads to a contradiction, both is and is not. Parmenides says this is the path most people try to follow, and this is why most people are totally confused. Actually, they're worse than confused, they are unwittingly engaged in self-contradiction. It's at about this point that most readers begin to suspect that they haven't the foggiest notion what Parmenides is talking about. Is and must be? Isn't and can't be? What is and what isn't? In the Greek there is no explicit subject for the verb is, it just floats free. Usually though, the idea is that we can apply his argument to anything we like. Take a giraffe. Either the giraffe is, in which case we can think and speak about it, or there is no giraffe, in which case Parmenides is right that it's at least difficult to understand how we could think or speak about it. He seems right again, when he says that the worst approach would be to say that the giraffe both is and is not. Thus, the path recommended to us is the path no one has yet taken, until Parmenides passes through those gates, to allow only being, while completely avoiding any attempt to think about or refer to non-being. Once we head off down this path, we find ourselves in unfamiliar territory. For starters, Parmenides points out that being cannot begin to be. After all, it would have to start being after there is no being, but non-being is something we promise not to contemplate. Nor can being be destroyed, for the same reason. It would have to change into non-being. Parmenides infers from this that change is in fact impossible. If there were change, whatever changes would have to go from non-being to being, or being to non-being. Since in either direction we would have the involvement of non-being, this is impossible. Now I know what you're thinking. Not all change involves creation and destruction. I can change a giraffe without killing it, for example by painting it blue, if I could get it to hold still for long enough. So that's a change that doesn't involve non-being. Parmenides, though, would beg to differ. Either because the blue of the painted giraffe replaces the non-being of blue in the giraffe, or what amounts to the same thing, because the blue giraffe comes to be after there is no blue giraffe. The same kind of argument will work for any supposed change, or even any supposed difference between one thing and another. To contrast our blue giraffe to a giraffe that is not blue, we would need to use the banned concept of non-being. So we can think of this as an argument for the unity of being over time. Being isn't one thing at one time and another thing at a later time, because it can't change. And furthermore, being must have unity at any one given time, because if there were variety in it, then one part of it would be different from another. And we just saw that you need to think of non-being to grasp the notion of difference. Parmenides gives a further argument for the unity of being at one and the same time. He points out that if being were divided up, it would need to have gaps or divisions in it. These gaps or divisions would, of course, consist of non-being, because they are different from being. So being is also continuous. Any part of it will be just the same as any other part. Now obviously it's starting to sound like Parmenides is not talking about giraffes, and not only because they were thin on the ground in ancient Italy. In fact, it's almost impossible to imagine this being that Parmenides is talking about until he compares it to a sphere. He says that it is spherical, because it must have some kind of limit or determination. This is maybe the most puzzling passage in the way of truth, against the admittedly strong competition offered by every other passage in the way of truth. For one thing, if being is a sphere, won't there be non-being outside the sphere, the non-being we aren't allowed to think or speak of? For this and other reasons, some interpreters want to see this idea that being is spherical as a kind of metaphor. Maybe the idea is to emphasize that it is determinate because we can think and reason and talk about it successfully. But he may mean it more literally, and be thinking that it is a sphere because it must be some shape, and the sphere is the most perfect shape. Shades of Pythagoreanism here, perhaps? In any case, he does go on to argue that being is perfect, and here his argument is a bit easier to follow. Being must be perfect, because if it were not, it would lack something that it could have, and in that case it would contain some kind of non-being, namely the absence of whatever is lacking. Well, let's take stock. The passages I've just discussed represent the core argument of Parmenides's way of truth, which has come down to us pretty much in its entirety. This is, incidentally, thanks to a commentator on Aristotle named Simplicius, who wrote a good thousand years later. He remarked that Parmenides's poem was hard to get hold of in his day, so that it was worth copying out at length into his commentary. He's also a major source for the other pre-Socratics, so let's take a moment to be thankful to good old Simplicius. In any case, we have these extensive fragments from the way of truth, and what they show is that Parmenides was offering a rational deduction. He starts from a basic principle, that you can have is, but you can't have is not, and then proceeds to explore the consequences, whatever they might be. Whatever we make of his argument, this is a real quantum leap in the history of philosophy. Parmenides is not just offering rational explanations of what he can see around him, though he goes on to do that in the way of opinion. Rather, he puts all his trust in reason itself, trusting the power of argument more than he trusts the evidence of his own eyes and ears. This is not to say that Parmenides is the first pre-Socratic to offer arguments. In the episode of Thales, I suggested that even he may already have had arguments for his views on water and the claim that everything is full of gods, and last week's guest M.M. McCabe convinced me, at least, that Heraclitus' fragments are implicitly arguments aimed at his readers. Nonetheless, Parmenides does represent something new. He tries to settle an abstract philosophical issue, the nature of being itself, with an explicit and complex deductive argument. But as you might expect, not many people have been persuaded by Parmenides' argument that all reality is nothing but a single unchanging sphere. On the other hand, plenty of philosophers since Parmenides have, knowingly or not, given arguments that are reminiscent of his way of truth. For instance, the argument for the perfection of being reappears in the medieval period as a way of trying to understand the perfection of God. And certainly Plato and Aristotle take Parmenides very seriously. Aristotle, for instance, devotes considerable energy to explaining how change is after all possible despite Parmenides' point that it would involve non-being. Closer to Parmenides himself were his immediate followers, the Eliadics. They worked hard to defend the astonishing conclusions of their master. It was in pursuit of this aim that Zeno of Elea developed the most brilliant set of paradoxes in ancient philosophy. Zeno's paradoxes try to undermine the possibility of change and multiplicity, making good on Parmenides' claim that no one can contemplate non-being without ending in self-contradiction. These paradoxes will be, and certainly will not not be, our main subject next week, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. .