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Parmenides of Elea Parmenides | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 540 BCE Elea, Italy |
| Died | 440 BCE Elea |
| School tradition | Eleatic |
| Notable students | Zeno of Elea |
Parmenides, or Parmenides of Elea, was a pre-Socratic ancient Greek idealist philosopher who was born into a wealthy aristocratic family around 515 BC.
He was credited as the founder of the Eleatic school. Parmenides is best known for his theories concerning the perception of reality, specifically that change, motion, and multiplicity are an illusion. Parmenides was the teacher of Zeno of Elea, who created famous paradoxes like "Achilles and the Tortoise" to defend Parmenides' theories of motion and change being impossible. He may have been a student of Xenophanes, but only became a philosopher after meeting Ameinias, who was a Pythagorean.[1]
Plato dedicated "Parmenides" to him. It was a dialogue, as he was heavily influenced by Parmenides' distinction between eternal truth and the illusion of the physical world, which directly shaped Plato's "Theory of Forms."[1]
Parmenides represents an idealism of form. Parmenides' denial of change contradicts our empirical and social reality, but it also treats change, contradictions, and development as illusions. His denial of "being" cuts off his philosophy from an empirical investigation that is needed to understand our social and natural processes.[1]
"The fundamental distinction between the materialist and the adherent of idealist philosophy consists in the fact that the materialist regards sensation, perception, idea, and the mind of man generally, as an image of objective reality." - Vladimir Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism.
Philosophy[edit | edit source]
Parmenides' philosophy is based on the premise that "You cannot think about or speak about 'nothing'." Since Parmenides has only one recorded work, most of his thoughts come from second-hand sources. Supposedly, the work "On Nature" by Parmenides was not titled by him, as it was originally untitled. His only remaining work consists of fragments, commonly called Parmenides' Poem or Fragments.[1]
As a preface, Parmenides' concept of monism treats the universe as static and timeless. By presenting this, he can ideologically justify the existing social and structural order by presenting change as impossible, thus promoting a form of conservatism. As Parmenides was born into a wealthy aristocratic family, it was in his interest to ideologically justify the status quo.[1]
There is a current ongoing academic debate on whether Parmenides was inspired by the concepts of Brahman and Maya. Brahman is a concept of an unchanging, unmoving, indivisible universe, and Maya is the term stating that human senses, change, and multiplicity are all illusions, which maps one-to-one onto Parmenides' philosophical views. Parmenides may have been exposed to these concepts through the Hindu Upanishads texts, which are the source for the Vedic Brahman and Maya concepts.[1]
Parmenides' poem/fragments begin with him describing himself riding a chariot drawn by horses while being guided by the "Daughters of the Sun." They travel through the darkness of human knowledge to reach a Goddess, who tells him he must learn two things: the heart of absolute truth and the unreliable opinions of mortals.[1]
''You must need learn all things, both the unshaken heart of well-rounded reality and the notions of mortals, in which there is no genuine trustworthiness. Nonetheless these things too will you learn, how what they resolved had actually to be, all through all pervading'' - Fragment 1
The Goddess then goes on to explain that there are only two paths: the path of "What exists" and the path of "What is not."
Parmenides argues through this poem that the path of nothingness is logically impossible. He means that you are unable to think of nothingness; the moment you think of the concept of nothing, you've created it in your head. Fundamentally, nothing cannot exist. He viewed only the things that you can think of as existing.[1]
"For it is the same thing to think and to be." - (Fragment 3)
He elaborates with his concepts of "Unbeing" and "Being."[1]
He means that for something to be created, it would have to be created out of nothing. In the same way, for something to be destroyed, it would have to turn into nothing. Since "nothing" does not exist, all things are existing and will always exist.[1]
He continued with this thought pattern regarding motion, where he basically says that for anything to move, it must move into an empty space. Since empty space is nothing, there is nowhere for anything to move; essentially, movement is impossible, and so is change.[1]
He also believed that the universe was finite, as Being was perfect, complete, and equally balanced in all directions, visualized as a perfect sphere. This concept is called monism and is the idea that reality is one single continuous solid block. The same applies to time; since, according to Parmenides, time is an illusion we experience, it also becomes one continuous solid block.[1]
"Nor was it once, nor will it be, for it is now, all together, one, continuous." - (Fragment 8)
Due to this idea that the universe is an unmoving, unchanging sphere, he argues that the human senses are completely untrustworthy, as our eyes tell us things move, grow, and die. This is a form of idealism, which states that we can only use reasoning to understand reality, as opposed to empiricism, which states we use our senses to observe reality.[1]
"Mortals knowing nothing wander, two-headed; for helplessness guides the wandering thought in their breasts" - (Fragment 6,)
Parmenides argues that the entire universe is built upon the two concepts of Light and Night, and that it is created through the mixing of Light and Night. However, he did not view them as separate; he states that it was humankind's greatest mistake to name them distinctly rather than naming them "One."[1]