Parmenides

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Portrait bust of Parmenides, probably made in the 3rd century BC after Metrodoros of Lampsakos (Epicurean)

Parmenides of Elea (Greek: Παρμενίδης; * c. 520/515 BC; † c. 460/455 BC) was one of the most important Greek philosophers from the time of the Pre-Socratics and lived in the southern Italian city of Elea founded by Greeks. His friend and pupil was Zeno of Elea. At the centre of Parmenides' teaching, as well as that of all the other Eleatics, was the immutability of being; all change, all becoming and passing away, is for him only appearance, arising from the delusions of mortals.

On Nature

In his poem On Nature, Parmenides describes how he is led by a team of horses, escorted by maidens, to the gate guarded by Dike, the goddess of justice, where the paths of day and night part. He is let in and is to learn everything here through the goddess' "reliable speech and thought", "the well-rounded truth's unshakable heart and mortals' delusional thoughts, in which reliable truth is not inherent."[1] Thus he first learns:

„This is necessary to say and to think, that [only] the existing exists. For its existence is possible, while that of the non-existent is not; I would have you take this to heart.“

– Parmenides: On Nature, Fragment 6[2]

Rudolf Steiner remarks on the thinking of Parmenides:

„Parmenides sees in external nature, which the senses contemplate, the untrue, the deceptive; in the unity, the imperishable, which thought grasps, alone the true.“ (Lit.:GA 18, p. 57)

For Parmenides, thinking and being are one and the same:

„For to think [being] and to be are the same thing.“

– Parmenides: On Nature, Fragment 5[3]

„Thinking and the goal of thought are one and the same; for you cannot encounter thinking without the Being in which it finds itself expressed. There is nothing and will be nothing else outside of being, since fate has bound it to the indivisible and immovable being. Therefore, all that mortals have established [in their language] must be empty sound, convinced that it is true: becoming as well as passing away, being as well as non-being, change of place and change of luminous colour.“

– Parmenides: On Nature, Fragment 8[4]

„One will realise the significance of this worldview, which is called the Eleatic (Parmenides and Zeno are from Elea), if one directs one's gaze to the fact that its bearers have progressed so far with the formation of thought-experience that they have fashioned this experience into a special art, the so-called dialectic. In this "art of thought" the soul learns to feel itself in its independence and inner unity. Thus the reality of the soul is felt as what it is through its own being, and as what it feels itself to be through the fact that it no longer, as in the past, lives along with the general world-experience, but unfolds in itself a life - the thought-experience - which is rooted in it, and through which it can feel itself implanted in a purely spiritual world-ground. At first this feeling does not yet find expression in a clearly expressed thought; but one can feel it alive as a feeling in this age by the esteem in which it is held. According to one of Plato's "Conversations", Parmenides told the young Socrates that he should learn the art of thought from Zeno, otherwise truth would remain distant from him. This 'art of thought' was felt to be a necessity for the human soul that wants to approach the spiritual primordial grounds of existence.“ (Lit.:GA 18, p. 57)

Parmenides' views were in sharp contrast to Heraclitus', who emphasised the constant changeability of all being:

„Parmenides and his followers tried to approach world phenomena from a completely different angle than the thinkers mentioned so far. They assumed that our senses cannot provide us with a faithful, true picture of the world. Heraclitus drew the conclusion from the fact that everything is eternally changing that there is nothing permanent, but that the eternal flow of all things corresponds to true being. Parmenides said exactly the opposite: because everything in the external world changes, because here everything eternally comes into being and passes away, that is why we cannot gain the true, the lasting, by observing the external world. We must regard what this outer world presents to us as an illusion and can only gain the eternal, the lasting, through thinking itself. The outer world is a delusion of the senses, a dream that is something quite different from what the senses make us believe. What this dream really is, what remains eternally the same, we cannot gain by observing the outer world, that reveals itself to us through thinking. In the outer world there is multiplicity and diversity; in thinking the Eternal One reveals itself to us, which does not change, which always remains the same. This is what Parmenides says in his didactic poem "On Nature". So we are dealing with a worldview which does not want to get the truth from the things themselves, but which seeks to spin the primordial ground of the world out of thought.“ (Lit.:GA 51, p. 24f)

„Parmenides therefore contrasts sharply with Heraclitus. With all the one-sidedness possible only to a bold philosopher, he rejected all testimony of sensual perception. For it is precisely this world of the senses, changing at every moment, that seduces the view of Heraclitus. Instead, he spoke of the only source of all truth as the revelations that emerge from the innermost core of the human personality, the revelations of thought. Not what flows before the senses is the real essence of things - according to his view - but the thoughts, the ideas, which thinking becomes aware of and holds in this stream!

Like so much that is done as a counter-attack to a one-sidedness, Parmenides' way of thinking also became disastrous. It corrupted European thinking for centuries to come. It undermined confidence in sense perception. While an unbiased, naïve view of the sensory world draws from it the content of thought that satisfies the human instinct for knowledge, the philosophical movement that developed in the spirit of Parmenides believed that the right truth could only be drawn from pure, abstract thought.

The thoughts that we gain in living intercourse with the world of the senses have an individual character, they have the warmth of something experienced in them. We expose our person by extracting ideas from the world. We feel ourselves to be overcomers of the sense world when we capture it in the world of thought. There is something impersonal, cold about abstract, pure thought. We always feel a compulsion when we spin the ideas out of pure thinking. Our sense of self cannot be lifted by such thinking. For we must simply submit to the necessity of thought.

Parmenides has not taken into account that thought is an activity of the human personality. He has taken it impersonally, as an eternal content of being. The thought is the being, he said. He has thereby substituted a new god for the old one. Whereas the older, religious mode of conception had placed the whole, feeling, willing and thinking human being as God at the head of the world, Parmenides took a single human activity, a part out of personality, and made of it a divine being.“ (Lit.:GA 30, p. 106f)

Finally, Parmenides compares the perfection of being to the perfect shape of a sphere:

„But since there is a final limit, [being] is complete on all sides, comparable to the mass of a well-rounded sphere, from the centre to all sides equally strong. It may not be greater or weaker here and there. For there is neither a nothing that would cancel a union, nor can a being somehow be more here, less there, than the being, since it is completely inviolable. For [the centre,] whither it is equally far on all sides, aims uniformly at the limits.“

– Parmenides: On Nature, Fragment 8[5]

Literature
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.

Weblinks

References

  1. ↑ Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Griechisch und Deutsch von Hermann Diels. 1. Band, Berlin 1922, p. 150
  2. ↑ Diels, p. 153
  3. ↑ Diels, p. 151
  4. ↑ Diels, p. 157
  5. ↑ Diels, p. 157f
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