Parmenides
43 quotes
Biography
Parmenides of Elea was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Elea in Magna Graecia.
"We can speak and think only of what exists. And what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous."
"You must learn all things, both the unshaken heart of persuasive truth, and the opinions of mortals in which there is no true warranty."
"The only roads of enquiry there are to think of: one, that it is and that it is not possible for it not to be, this is the path of persuasion (for truth is its companion); the other, that it is not and that it must not be — this I say to you is a path wholly unknowable."
"For it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be."
"It is indifferent to me where I am to begin, for there shall I return again."
"Never will this prevail, that the things that are not are — bar your thought from this road of inquiry."
"Do not let habit, born from experience, force you along this road, directing aimless eye and echoing ear and tongue; but judge by reason the much contested proof which I have spoken."
"The purest example of the Greek desire to comprehend, a desire which in him would have nothing to do with what was not strictly knowable. If later philosophers appear softer by comparison, it is perhaps because of a revivifying compromise they made, one more acceptable and more tolerant of the discourse we perhaps need; but, by the same token, one can perhaps be forgiven for sometimes thinking them dwarfed by the inhuman shadow of the master."
"The Greek tradition was a complete contrast to that of the Far East. ...the Greeks placed logic at the pinnacle of human thinking. Their sceptical attitude towards the wielding of 'non-being' as some sort of 'something' that could be subject to logical development was exemplified by Parmenides influential arguments against the concept of empty space. ...He maintained that you can only speak about what is: what is not cannot be thought of, and what cannot be thought of cannot be. ...more unexpected was the further conclusion that time, motion nor change could exist either."
"The crisis at the heart of Parmenides' argument, "is or is not," rules out any candidate for an ultimate entity in an explanation of what there is that is subject to coming-to-be, passing-away, or alteration of any sort. Such an entity must be a whole, complete, unchanging unity: it must be a thing that is of a single kind … But it does not follow from this that there can be only one such entity. Parmenides' arguments allow for a plurality of fundamental, predicationally unified entities that can be used to explain the world reported by the senses."
"Parmenides believed that all Being is what he called the One, and denied absolutely the possibility of change. He believed that the cosmos is full (i.e., no void), uncreated, eternal, indestructible, unchangeable, immobile sphere of being, and all sensory evidence to the contrary is illusory. One Parmenidean fragment stated, "Either a thing is or it is not," meaning that creation and destruction is impossible."
"From this inheritance contemporary philosophers have continued to draw profit. Parmenides is their earliest ancestor whose work contains explicit and self-conscious argumentation. The severe conceptual difficulties posed for the first time in his verses are of perennial interest, and many of them remain in the forefront of discussion today. Recent study has thus brought his thought, in the words of another critic, "astonishingly close to some contemporary preoccupations." He should be viewed not only as "the most original and important philosopher before Socrates" but as the first extant author deserving to be called a philosopher in a present-day sense of the word."
"One cannot say that the case for Parmenides is proved. If it is accepted, it is a strange freak of history that so fundamental a discovery should have been made by one for whom the whole physical world was an unreal show."
"Greek philosophy returned for some time to the concept of the One in the teachings of Parmenides... His most important contribution... was, perhaps, that he introduced a purely logical argument into metaphysics. "One cannot know what is not—that is impossible—nor utter it; for it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be." Therefore, only the One is, and there is no becoming or passing away. Parmenides denied the existence of empty space for logical reasons. Since all change requires empty space... he dismissed change as an illusion."
"What is clear is that Parmenides is making a conscious attempt at some kind of a new start. Like Descartes, he is trying to find an unassailable starting-point on which something further can be built. This search is understandable, given the intellectual situation of the time. The principles of the Milesians had yielded no one clearly true system, but a number of rival ones — in itself a scandal. Heraclitus had made the whole of cosmology suspect by revealing deep-seated contradictions at its heart. In the background, the Pythagoreans were directly or indirectly stimulating new lines of thought and using them, perhaps, for their own mysterious purposes."
"Of the philosophers, Thales is vaguely reported to have taught that souls are immortal. But neither he nor his immediate successors... believed in the immortality of particular souls... This doctrine belongs to the Orphic tradition. In Heracleitus and Parmenides we find the two doctrines of immortality... implicit in mysticism, separated... for the first time. Heracleitus is the champion of the Dionysiac... life and death... in an unending cycle; Parmenides, under Orphic influence, teaches... Soul has fallen from... light and reality to the dark and unreal... bodily existence. This, however, is... only 'the way of opinion'... [Parmenides] feels.... that... substantiality... is not so easily got rid of. But he will not give up... eternal substance. The most interesting fragment of Parmenides... seems to enunciate, for the first time in Greek thought, the mystical doctrine of eternity as a timeless Now, as opposed to the popular... unending succession. There remains then only to give an account of one way—that real Being exists. Many signs... showing... it is unborn, indestructible, entire, unique, unshakable, and unending. It never was, and it never will be, since it is all together present in the Now, one and indivisible. Empedocles... repudiates... Parmenides, probably on the ground that he reduces the world of time and change to nullity... thus leaves no pathway from appearance to reality. His doctrine of the soul’s exile and wanderings is... Orphic doctrine, which Pindar also gives... in the second Olympian Ode. The Soul sins by separating itself from God... from love and a choice of ' strife ’ in the place of harmony. The immortal Soul is... love and strife blended; the body... only an 'alien garment'... perishes at death. ...Empedocles describes the Soul as a ratio, or harmony ...the complex of...'strife'... bound... by the principle of unity...'love'...Parmenides ...may be ...rejects the Pytdhagorean doctrines ...finds truth in static materialism."
"Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the Immortal Principle, the One, Truth, God, is separate from appearance and from opinion, and the importance of this separation and its effect upon subsequent history cannot be overstated. It's here that the classic mind, for the first time, took leave of its romantic origins and said, "The Good and the True are not necessarily the same," and goes its separate way. Anaxagoras and Parmenides had a listener named Socrates who carried their ideas into full fruition."
"It was, for all I know, the first deductive theory of the world, the first deductive cosmology: One further step led to theoretical physics, and to the atomic theory."
"If I accede to Parmenides there is nothing left but the One; if I accede to Zeno, not even the One is left."
"The path of speech (mythos odoio) (by Parmenides) contains within itself the path of day and that of night. It is no coincidence that Parmenides' poem comprises two parts. What exactly the second part contains and why it is so is an ancient philological and exegetical problem that we will not address here and which Plato already denounced in its ambiguity. In fact, it is not possible to separate being and speech without identifying them, and it is not possible to identify them without, ipso facto, separating them. The “simulation” (the simul) is immediate and structural. Human beings are simulators precisely because they are beings of truth. They cannot tell the truth without lying and vice versa. In this sense, they are beings of mediation, beings that stand in the middle, as you happily recall, that is, beings that ‘work’ to translate immediate experience into knowledge, or into a transferential process. God and nature do not work, but human beings do, first and foremost in naming the fruit of sexuality; it then places humans in the relational milieu of parents and children, brothers and sisters, offered, either really or symbolically, in sacrifice to God, that is, to the community of speakers. [...] The 20th century cannot exist without Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis cannot exist without philosophy, at least in my opinion."
"One of Parmenides' merits is to have been the first philosopher who strove to handle general concepts like "being", "not-being", "knowing", "unity", "identity", in their systematic connection."
"The philosophy of Parmenides is a strange blend of mysticism and logic. It is mysticism, for its goal is not the gradual and cumulative correction of empirical knowledge, but deliverance from it through the instantaneous and absolute grasp of "immovable" truth. This is not the way of techne, but the way of revelation: it lies "beyond the path of men" (B. 1.27). Yet this revelation is itself addressed to man's reason and must be judged by reason. Its core is pure logic: a rigorous venture in deductive thinking, the first of its kind in European thought. This kind of thinking could be used against the world of the senses … This projection of the logic of Being upon the alien world of Becoming was Parmenides' most important single contribution to the history of thought, though it is seldom recognized as such. Without it, his doctrine of Being could have remained a speculative curiosity. With it, he laid the foundations for the greatest achievement of the scientific imagination of Greece, the atomic hypothesis."
"Followers of Parmenides worked themselves into logical knots and mystic raptures over the rather blatant contradiction between point five and everyday experience."
"The truth is, that these writings of mine were meant to protect the arguments of Parmenides against those who make fun of him and seek to show the many ridiculous and contradictory results which they suppose to follow from the affirmation of the one. My answer is addressed to the partisans of the many, whose attack I return with interest by retorting upon them that their hypothesis of the being of many, if carried out, appears to be still more ridiculous than the hypothesis of the being of one."
"[P]ossibly... Parmenides believed in a "philosophic life" (§ 35), and... got the idea from the Pythagoreans; but there is very little trace... of his having been... affected by the religious side of Pythagoreanism. ...[T]here are traces of Orphic ideas in the poem ...Parmenides was a western Hellene, and he had probably been a Pythagorean, so it is not a little remarkable that he should be so free from the common tendency of his age and country. ...[L]ike most of the older philosophers, he took part in politics; and recorded that he legislated for his native city. Others add that the magistrates of Elea made the citizens swear every year to abide by the laws which Parmenides had given them.<!--pp. 194-195-->"