ATOMISM IN A NUTSHELL

Out of respect for Leucippus, our discussion of atomism will be avoid naming names as much as possible, referring to him and Democritus as the atomists, although such an impersonal approach sharply contradicts both my practice and my general inclination. I do it, however, very reluctantly, and by no means following the lead of Bertrand Russell, who does this nonchalantly, starting with the chapter on The Milesian School, where such impersonality has far less justification, in my eyes.

The most astonishing feature of Atomism is that it sounds terribly like modern science, to the point where a suspicion of later tampering might even creep in, in spite of the clear evidence that no such tampering had indeed occurred.

Atomism in a nutshell contends, according to Diogenes Laertius’ rendition, that the whole universe consists of atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist. The worlds are unlimited; they come into being and perish. Nothing can come into being from that which is not, nor pass away into that which is not. The atoms constitute all things, they are indestructible, eternal, and in constant motion. They all differ in shape and size, but what they have in common is that they are so minuscule that none of them can be further divided (hence the name atomos, undividable). As for the empty space, or void, in which the atoms move, here is indeed a revolutionary first: asserting the existence of “nothing,” which is! Aristotle writes about it, in On Generation and Corruption, with a certain ambiguity, as if he himself is unsure on the finer metaphysical points of this atomistic discovery:

Leucippus thought he had a theory which harmonized with sense-perception, and would not abolish either the coming-to-be and passing-away or motion and the multiplicity of things. He made these concessions to the facts of perception. On the other hand, he conceded to the Monists that there can be no motion without a void. The result is a theory, which states as follows: “The void is a not-being, and no part of what is, is a not-being; for what is in the strict sense of the term is an absolute plenum. This plenum, however, is not a one; on the contrary, it is a many, infinite in number, and invisible, owing to the minuteness of their bulk. The many move in the void (for there is a void): and by coming together they produce coming-to-be, while by separating they produce passing away. Moreover, they act, and suffer action, whenever they chance to be in contact (for, there they are not one), and generate by being put together and becoming intertwined. From the genuinely one, on the other hand, there could never have come to be a multiplicity, nor from the genuinely many a one: that is impossible.”

What greatly amuses me here is that, having seen so much word-parsing and a metaphysical gobbledygook ad absurdum, with Zeno’s paradoxes and all, this colossal paradox contained in the Aristotelian quotation passes unchallenged! On the one hand, “the void is a not-being, and no part of what is,” but, on the other hand, “there is a void”!!! This is exactly what the atomists have proclaimed, that the void, or nothing, is! I believe that metaphysically the existence of nothing makes much more sense than its non-existence, and, in this sense, to the atomists belongs a truly earthshaking metaphysical discovery, and they ought to be given a more proper credit for it. But, mind you, I am talking here only about the metaphysics of it and not about its physics, where the controversy about empty space has existed until the twentieth century, and was settled… sort of, in the way as will be shortly presented. To avoid confusion, I need to remind the reader that our next paragraph is still discussing metaphysics, at least as far as I am concerned.

Russell puts this issue quite concisely: “The first and most obvious way of avoiding the logical difficulty is to distinguish between matter and space. According to this view, space is not nothing, but is of the nature of a receptacle, which may or may not have any give part filled with matter.” And here is Aristotle again: “The theory that the void exists involves the existence of place, for one would define void as a place bereft of body.”

Unlike the situation with the metaphysics of empty space, or absolute space, as Newton asserts physically), the modern state of physics of it has been well summarized by Bertrand Russell in a passage that deserves to be quoted in full:

The modern physicist, while he still believes that matter is in some sense atomic, does not believe in empty space. Where there is not matter, there is still something, notably, light-waves. Matter no longer possesses the lofty status that it acquired in philosophy through the arguments of Parmenides. It is not an unchanging substance, but merely a way of grouping events. Some events belong to groups, which can be regarded as material things; others, such as light-waves, do not. It is the events that are the stuff of the world and each of them is of brief duration. In this respect modern physics is on the side of Heraclitus against Parmenides. But it was on the side of Parmenides until Einstein and quantum theory.

As regards space, the modern view is that it is neither a substance, as Newton maintained, and Leucippus and Democritus ought to have said, nor an adjective of extended bodies, as Dèscartes thought, but a system of relations, as Leibniz held. It is by no means clear, whether this view is compatible with the existence of the void. Perhaps, as a matter of abstract logic, it can be reconciled with the void. We may say that between any two things there is a greater or smaller distance, and that it doesn’t imply the existence of intermediate things. Such a point of view, however, would be impossible to utilize in modern physics. Since Einstein, the distance is between events, not between things, and involves time, as well as space. It is essentially a causal conception, and in modern physics there is no action at a distance. All this, however, is based on empirical, rather than on logical grounds. Moreover, the modern view cannot be stated except in terms of differential equations, and would therefore be unintelligible to the philosophers of antiquity.

It would seem, accordingly, that the logical development of the atomists’ views is the Newtonian theory of absolute space, which meets the difficulty of attributing reality to not-being. There are no logical objections to this theory. The chief objection is that absolute space is absolutely unknowable, and cannot therefore be a necessary hypothesis in an empirical science. A practical objection is that physics can get on without it. But the world of the atomists remains logically possible, and it is more akin to the actual world than is the world of any other of the ancient philosophers.

The purpose of the extended Russellian excerpt above was to put the atomistic theory in proper perspective insofar as subsequent developments of physics are concerned. It goes without saying that the excerpt’s role in the present entry is mostly for the reader’s reference. But, as I said before, it touches upon physics, while the highly curious metaphysics of the atomistic theory is left unchallenged, and, as Russell himself admits it, the theory itself is logically possible, which means that the logic in it is solid enough to have withstood the test of time.

THE LAUGHING PHILOSOPHER

(Democritus and Leucippus where two highly recognizable names in the USSR, where atomism was treated as a synonym of materialism, Marx and all, so what else could you expect for the forefathers of the atomist-materialist theory. My jocular tone in this case must not under any circumstances be seen as some sign of derision, as I regard very highly all efforts of the Soviet system to educate the citizenry in the best traditions of Western culture. Using materialism as a pretext to acquaint the public with the great Greeks? I see nothing wrong with such practice!)

Democritus of Abdera in Thrace (born ca. 460 BC; died in 370 BC) was most likely a pupil of Leucippus, and the co-originator of the belief that all matter is made up of various imperishable indivisible elements, which he called “atomos.” His work has come to us only in secondhand reports, oftentimes unreliable and conflicting. For this reason it is virtually impossible to tell which exactly of his revolutionary ideas can be attributed to him properly, and which have originated with Leucippus.

He is often referred to as the laughing philosopher, because of his genuinely sunny disposition. (In which nickname he is contrasted to Heraclitus, who is known as the weeping philosopher.) Not surprisingly, then, did Horace write, Si foret in terris, rideret Democritus. (Epistles, II-I-194.)

The best evidence on Democritus is provided by Aristotle, who wrote a monograph on him, of which only a few passages, quoted by other sources, have survived. Democritus is often perceived as having taken over and systematized the views of Leucippus, which considerably reduces his aura of pre-Socratic originality, but because we know so little about Leucippus, the latter’s credit for originality has rubbed off and passed on to Democritus. Thus, even though it is occasionally possible to distinguish some contributions as those of Leucippus proper, the overwhelming majority of reports point either to both of them, or to Democritus alone, and the developed atomist system is generally accepted as Democritean.

Diogenes Laertius lists a large number of works by Democritus in several fields, including ethics, physics, mathematics, music, and cosmology. Two works: the Great World System and the Little World System, are usually ascribed to Democritus, although Theophrastus reports that the former work is by Leucippus. There are more questions regarding the authenticity of Democritean ethical sayings. Two collections of these are recorded in the fifth-century anthology of Stobaeus, one ascribed to Democritus and another ascribed to an ambiguous philosopher Democrates, which may of course be just a corrupted name of Democritus himself. Thus, other sources attribute this work directly to Democritus, dispensing with the Democrates nonsense. As far as I am concerned, the existence of two philosophers called Democritus and Democrates, promoting the same original theory, with one of them, namely, the latter, otherwise unknown and undistinguished, is rather absurd and unworthy of further attention.

Chronologically Democritus was a younger contemporary of Socrates, but there are at least two compelling reasons why he should be treated as a pre-Socratic. First, he is always in tandem with Leucippus, who is a bona fide pre-Socratic. Secondly, he has a pre-Socratic mind, which identifies him as such with Nietzsche, who does not mention Leucippus at all, and with Bertrand Russell, who gives the following, unmistakably Nietzschean, characteristic of Democritus as a quintessential pre-Socratic:

“Democritus--- such at least is my opinion--- is the last of the great philosophers to be free from a certain fault which vitiated all later ancient and medieval thought. All the philosophers we have been considering so far (the pre-Socratics!) were engaged in a disinterested effort to understand the world. They thought it easier to understand than it is, but without this optimism they would not have had the courage to make the beginning. Their attitude was mainly genuinely scientific, when it did not merely embody the prejudices of their age. But it was not only scientific; it was imaginative and vigorous, filled with delight of adventure. They were interested in everything--- meteors and eclipses, fishes and whirlwinds, religion and morality… with a penetrating intellect they combined the zest of children.

From this point onwards, there are first seeds of decay in spite of previously unmatched achievement, then a gradual decadence. What is amiss--even in the best philosophy after Democritus-- is an undue emphasis on man, as compared with the universe. First comes skepticism, with the Sophists leading to a study of how we know, rather than to the attempt to acquire fresh knowledge. Then comes, with Socrates, the emphasis on ethics; with Plato, the rejection of the world of sense, in favor of the self-created world of pure thought; with Aristotle, the belief in purpose as the fundamental concept in science. After them, there was a decay of vigor and a recrudescence of popular superstition. It was not until the Renaissance that philosophy would regain the vigor and independence that characterize the predecessors of Socrates.”

Even Nietzsche could not have written a better apologia for the pre-Socratics, and on this glowing note, we see fit to close this entry.

 

THE OTHER TWIN OF THE ATOMIC COUPLE

(Who was Leucippus, and what do we really know about him? Here I have called him “the other twin” before I have introduced the “first and foremost twin,” thus defying the rules of logic and common sense. The rules yes, but on hearing me out, it becomes obvious that the laws remain unmolested, and that my decision does make better sense than had I followed the rules.)

Does being the teacher make one greater than the student? Leucippus has been known to originate the ideas which would later make Democritus famous. Does this make him greater than Democritus? Not necessarily at all. The question must be asked why is it so that we do not have any of Leucippus’ works extant, whereas we have the works of Democritus in relative abundance? Granted that Leucippus must have been a man of genius, the fact that he has been overshadowed by his pupil so completely cannot be attributed to some sort of conspiracy, but it clearly shows us the greatness of Democritus, who not only must have developed his teacher’s ideas well beyond the level where Leucippus had taken them to, but he also organized them, and made them available to future generations, which his teacher had certainly failed to do by himself. Having said that, we must take it for granted that both Leucippus and Democritus were truly great men, who have deserved our respect and admiration in virtually equal measure.

The philosophical phenomenon sometimes seen as the ultimate development of the pluralistic tendency in Greek thought has received the name of Atomism. Four major philosophers have been associated with this development, two earlier thinkers, Leucippus and Democritus, and two later ones, Epicurus and Lucretius. For obvious reasons, only the first two are of interest to us in this section. We shall deal with the other two in our Significant Others section, later on.

The Greek tradition regarded Leucippus as the founder of atomism in physics, but we know so little about him that Epicurus, who was a much later follower of the illustrious Democritus, even denied his existence. Of Leucippus’ works nothing has come down to us, except for one sentence, quoted by Aristotle, who also has a few allusions to him. The sentence actually reads: Nothing happens for nothing, but everything from a ground and of necessity. We shall discuss this sentence and other features of the atomistic philosophy in the next cluster of entries, focusing on Democritus, where Leucippus will be essentially reduced to the status of the other twin of the atomic couple, as the works of Democritus are well known, while Leucippus’ views are practically impossible to distinguish from those of Democritus.

Leucippus came from Miletus, flourished around 440 BC, and was thus a contemporary of Anaxagoras. He is believed to have been influenced by Parmenides and Zeno of Elea. Some call him a student of Zeno, and suggest that he developed his atomistic philosophy to circumvent the problems raised by the Parmenidean challenge.

The above by no means exhausts our references to Leucippus, but, as I said before in this entry, all matters of substance concerning him will be discussed in the next cluster of entries, which begins with the portrait of his much better known “twin,” also called “the laughing philosopher.”

WARM AND COLD AS MOTION AND REST

Our next entry must be completely unexpected, as we are introducing here a very minor philosopher who is so minor that it is hard to find a mention of him anywhere except in an explicitly hostile to him Testimonial by the early Christian writer Hippolytus, who uses him as an example of former philosophical heresies. We know that Archelaus lived in the fifth century BC and was a reputed teacher of Socrates (note the indefinite article a, as Socrates must surely have learned from many different teachers).

Once again we are breaking the chronological order, because it looks like Archelaus was mostly influenced by Anaxagoras, whom we have just discussed. The fact that we have chosen to mention Archelaus at all, is due to some originality which he displays in his development of Anaxagorian ideas. So, here is Hippolytus with his testimonial.

Archelaus, son of Apollodorus, was by birth an Athenian. He spoke about the mixture of matter in a similar way to Anaxagoras, and of the first principles likewise. He held, however, that there was a certain mixture immanent even in Nous. He also held that there were two efficient causes, which were separated off from one another, namely, the warm and the cold. The former was in motion, the latter at rest. When the water was liquefied, it flowed to the center, and there being burnt up, it turned to earth and air, the latter of which was carried upwards, while the former took up its position below. These then, are the reasons why the earth is at rest, and why it came into being. It lies in the center (geocentrism is, of course, a fallback from certain earlier revolutionary theories of the universe!) being practically no appreciable part of the universe. But the air rules over all things, produced by the burning of the fire,--- and from its original combustion comes the substance of the heavenly bodies. Of these the sun is the largest, and the moon second; the rest are of various sizes. He says that the heavens were inclined, and then, the sun made fight upon the earth, made the air transparent, and the earth-- dry; for it was originally a pond, being high at the circumference and hollow in the center. He adduces as proof of this hollowness that the sun does not rise and set at the same time for all peoples, as it ought to do, if the earth were level. As to animals, he says that when the earth was first being warm in the lower part where the warm and the cold were mingled together many living creatures appeared and especially people all having the same manner of life and deriving their sustenance from the slime; they did not live long, and later on, generation from one another began. And people were distinguished from the rest and set up leaders and laws and arts and cities, and so forth. And he also says that Nous is implanted in all animals alike; for each of the animals as well as humans makes use of Nous, but some quicker and some slower.

This is about all that can be said about Archelaus, so far. Probably the most significant part of this narrative is the theory of warm and cold as the two efficient causes, one associated with motion, the other, with rest. Yes it is fairly ingenuous and therefore must be treated with some respect: not because it is true but because it has some interesting general implications, from which the subsequent generations could profit, and which they could keep building on.

MIND OVER MATTER

The philosophical novelties introduced by Anaxagoras are highly significant and unquestionably stimulating for a further development of human thought, the latter being of course the preeminent mark of greatness.

Most of his intellectual achievements are in the field of ontology, which is natural, considering that much of the philosophical discussion at the time focused on matters ontological. The initial composition of the world was still an open question, ever since it had been raised by Anaximander. The most recent answer to it had been the Empedoclean four roots, but Anaxagoras found it definitely unsatisfactory. According to him, in the beginning, the germs of all things were already present:

(1). All things were together, infinite both in number and in smallness; for the small also was infinite. And when they were all together, nothing was clear and distinct because of their smallness; for air and aether comprehended all things, both being infinite; for these are present in everything, and are greatest both as to number and as to greatness. (2). For, air and aether are separated from the surrounding mass; and the surrounding (mass) is infinite in quantity. (3). And since these things are so, it is necessary to think that in all the objects that are compound there existed many things, and germs of all objects, having all sorts of forms and colors and tastes. (4). But, before the separation, when things were together, not even was any color clear and distinct for the mixture of all things prevented it, the mixture of moist and dry, of the warm and the cold and of the bright and the dark (since much earth was present) and of germs infinite in number, in no way like each other; for none of the other things at all resembles the one the other.

When the separation and mixture occur, things that we identify as separate receive their identity according to the preponderance in their constitution of a particular germ, while all of them still retaining a portion of everything. (6) But nothing different is like anything else, but in whatever object there are the most, each single object is and was most distinctly these things. (Thus things are called after the element, or elements (homoeomeries), which predominate in their make-up)… And here Anaxagoras gives his own explanation of the concepts of birth and death:

(17). The Greeks do not rightly use the terms ‘coming into being’ and ‘perishing.’ For nothing comes into being, nor yet does anything perish, but there is mixture and separation of things that are. So, they would do right in calling the coming into being ‘mixture,’ and the perishing ‘separation.’

And now the seminal concept of Mind/Nous enters the picture. Nous creates change by initiating motion that leads to separation and mixture alike. In other words, Nous is in control of nature and in control of birth, life and death. In fact, the living things are distinguished from the dead things by Nous entering in the mixture of the germs, spermata. (5). In all (other) things there is a portion of everything except mind; and there are (living) things in which there is mind also. A more detailed description of Nous is given in Fragments 6&7:

(6). Other things include a portion of everything, but mind is infinite and self-powerful, and it is mixed with nothing, but it exists alone, itself by itself. For, if it were not by itself, but were mixed with anything else, it would include parts of all things, if it were mixed with another thing; for a portion of everything exists in everything, as has been said by me before, and things mingled with it would prevent it from having power over anything, in the same way that it does now that it is alone by itself. For, it is the most rarefied of all things, and the purest, and it has all knowledge in regard to everything, and the greatest power. Over all that has life, both greater and less, mind rules. And mind ruled the rotation of the whole, so that it set it in rotation in the beginning. First it began the rotation from a small beginning, then more and more was included in the motion, and yet more will be included. Both the mixed and the separated and distinct, all things mind recognized. And whatever things were to be, and whatever things were, as many as are now, and whatever things shall be, all these mind arranged in order; and it arranged that rotation, according to which now rotate stars and sun and moon and air and aether, now that they are separated. Rotation itself caused the separation, and the dense is separated from the rare, the warm from the cold, the bright from the dark, the dry from the moist. And there are many portions of many things. Nothing is absolutely separated nor distinct, one thing from another, except mind. All mind is of like character, both the greater and the smaller. (7). And when mind began to set things in motion, there was separation from everything that was in motion, and, however much mind set in motion, all this was made distinct. The rotation of the things that were moved and made distinct caused them to be yet more distinct.

Such is, in essence, the Anaxagorian ontology (or should I say, ontology-plus?). In my opinion, it is quite original, and intellectually fertile, altogether enough to immortalize Anaxagoras as one of history’s greatest thinkers, which judgment we now pronounce as our final verdict.

ANAXAGORAS WHO?

A short biographical reference is now in order.

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (c. 500 BC–428 BC) by virtue of his birth belonged to what is now often called the Ionian School of philosophy. His world-historical importance, emphasized by Russell, is due to the fact that in his early adulthood he went to Athens, rapidly becoming the center of Greek culture, where he was to remain for some thirty years. There he had become a friend of the all-powerful Pericles, and thus exerted an enormous influence on the intellectual life of Athens during the Golden Age of Greece. Euripides was said to have been influenced by him (see above), and some sources suggest that perhaps Socrates, too, was at some time among his disciples.

His luck changed, however, when Pericles’ enemies started plotting against him and attacked his favorites, in order to undermine Pericles’ power. Anaxagoras was arrested and charged with impiety, as his theories demonstrably clashed with the established religious dogmas. Released, thanks to a personal intervention of his benefactor, Anaxagoras however was forced to flee Athens, now settling in Lampsacus in Ionia (circa 434), where he died a few years later. Local citizens erected an altar to Mind and Truth, in his honor, and turned the anniversary of his death into a school holiday, apparently, in accordance with his wish.

Of his philosophical works only a few fragments have survived, but it is to his philosophy that we are now turning our attention in the next entry. Anaxagoras made certain curious advances in his ontology, such as a presentiment of the atomic theory, the periodic table of elements, and the introduction of Nous, Mind, as the force that enters into the composition of all living matter, thus distinguishing it from dead matter. All these philosophical novelties together make his achievement worthy of occupying the first rank among the great pre-Socratic philosophers, and I believe that Nietzsche is more right in this than Russell, as he is also right in the case of Schopenhauer, who is, of course, one of the greatest philosophers in history, no matter what others may say.

ANAXAGORAS AND PERICLES

(See also my already posted [January 19^th, 2013] entry Archon Of The Thirty-Year Empire, devoted to Pericles, and mentioning Anaxagoras, albeit tangentially.)

Here, as promised, is Nietzsche’s discussion of Pericles as a disciple of Anaxagoras in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of The Greeks. Nietzsche calls Pericles “the greatest of all Anaxagoreans,” and considering that Anaxagoras was the undisputed intellectual leader in Athens during her “Golden Age,” such a distinction is definitely worth something better than, say, my very excellent Bertrand Russell is willing to acknowledge, and to yield to the great Greek.---

“The greatest of all Anaxagoreans, however, is Pericles, the mightiest and worthiest man of the world; and Plato bears witness that the philosophy of Anaxagoras alone had given that sublime flight to the genius of Pericles. When as a public orator he stood before his people, in the beautiful rigidity and immobility of a marble Olympian, and now, calm, wrapped in his mantle, with unruffled drapery, without any change of facial expression, without smile, with a voice the strong tone of which remained ever the same, and when he now spoke in an absolutely un-Demosthenic but merely Periclean fashion, when he thundered, struck with lightnings, annihilated and redeemed,-- then he was the epitome of the Anaxagorean Cosmos, the image of the Nous, who has built for Itself the most beautiful and dignified receptacle, then Pericles was as it were the visible human incarnation of the building, moving, eliminating, ordering, reviewing, artistically-undetermined force of the Mind. Anaxagoras himself said man was the most rational being or he must necessarily shelter the Nous within himself in greater fullness than all other beings, because he had such admirable organs as his hands; Anaxagoras concluded therefore, that that Nous, according to the extent to which It made Itself master of a material body, was always forming for Itself out of this material the tools corresponding to Its degree of power, consequently, the Nous made the most beautiful and appropriate tools, when It was appearing in his greatest fullness. And as the most wondrous and appropriate action of the Nous was that circular primal-motion, since at that time the Mind was still together, undivided, in Itself, thus to the listening Anaxagoras the effect of the Periclean speech often appeared perhaps as a simile of that circular primal-motion; for here too he perceived a whirl of thoughts moving itself at first with awful force but in an orderly manner, which in concentric circles gradually caught and carried away the nearest and farthest and which, when it reached its end, had reshaped — organizing and segregating — the whole nation.”

Surely, I say, a man of Anaxagorean stature, exerting such a profound influence on the genius of the great Pericles himself and around Athens in her glorious heyday, could not be a second-rate philosopher even on the mere strength of this connection! So, let us stay with this subject in our next entry.

ANAXAGORAS AND… SCHOPENHAUER

This is the first of my four entries on Anaxagoras, and it has no philosophical link to Schopenhauer, except for the controversy over their historical evaluation. Like the latter, who is sometimes called the first among the second rank, Anaxagoras is generally placed below the universally recognized giants. Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, allots to him a tiny chapter, in which he twice repeats at the start and at the end that Anaxagoras is hardly “the equal of Pythagoras, Heraclitus, or Parmenides; not quite of the first rank,” but “has nevertheless a considerable historical importance.”

On the other side of this evaluation, we have Nietzsche’s opinion of Schopenhauer and Anaxagoras, both of whom, in his view, are definitely of the first rank. Anaxagoras is of course prominently included among his Group of Eight, and in the Philosophy in the Tragic Age of The Greeks Nietzsche probably talks about Anaxagoras more than about any other pre-Socratic. We shall quote Nietzsche’s remarkable passage on Anaxagoras and Pericles in the next entry. Anaxagoras is also afforded a special distinction (although to be taken with a grain of salt) as the inspirer of Euripides, in the following passage from The Birth of Tragedy:

“As a poet then Euripides was mostly concerned with rendering his conscious perceptions, and it is this that gives him his importance in the history of Greek drama. With regard to his poetic procedure that was both critical and creative, he must often have felt that he was applying to drama the opening words of this Anaxagorian treatise: ‘In the beginning all things were mixed together; then reason came and introduced order.’ And, just as Anaxagoras with his concept of reason seems like the first sober philosopher in a company of drunkards, so Euripides may have appeared to himself as the first rational maker of tragedy.”

And now we shall proceed with Nietzsche’s discussion of Pericles as a disciple of Anaxagoras, which is so important in this context that we are allotting it a separate entry.

THE GREAT CHARLATAN

Bertrand Russell treats Empedocles with great respect, if not so much by showering admiring epithets upon him, then by giving him a lot of space in his History of Western Philosophy. This is how he introduces him at the beginning of the Empedoclean Chapter (we are abridging Russell’s narrative):

The mixture of philosopher, prophet, man of science, and charlatan, which we found already in Pythagoras, was exemplified very completely in Empedocles. He was a younger contemporary of Parmenides, though his doctrine had in some ways more affinity with that of Heraclitus. He was a democratic Sicilian politician who at the same time claimed to be a god. In due course, he was banished, but he appears after banishment, to have preferred the career of a sage to that of an intriguing refugee. It seems probable that in youth he was more or less Orphic; that before his exile he combined politics and science; and that it was only in later life, as an exile, that he became a prophet.

His most important contribution to science was his discovery of air as a separate substance. This he proved by the observation that when a bucket is put upside down into water the water does not enter the bucket. He also discovered at least one example of centrifugal force: that if a cup of water is whirled around at the end of a string, the water does not come out. As regards astronomy, he knew that the moon shines by reflected light, but thought that this was also true of the sun. He said that light takes time to travel, but so little time that we cannot observe it. He was the founder of the Italian school of medicine. All this shows the scientific vigor of his time, which was not equaled in the later ages of Greece.

I shall not retell Russell’s account of Empedocles’ cosmology: some of this account has been made in the previous entries; for a fuller picture, I direct the reader to the proper sources of such information. But the ending of Russell’s chapter on Empedocles must be quoted here at the end of my own Empedoclean series:

The originality of Empedocles outside science consists in the doctrine of the four elements and in the use of the two principles of Love and Strife to explain change.

He rejected monism, and regarded the course of nature as regulated by chance and necessity rather than by purpose. In these respects his philosophy was more scientific than those of Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle. In other respects, it is true, he acquiesced in current superstitions, but in these he was no worse than many more recent men of science.

This seems to me like a proper ending for our miniseries on Empedocles, and I shall leave it like this until the next phase of revisions.

FATUM LIBELLORUM

We can expect Empedocles to be rated among the highest on Nietzsche’s pre-Socratic list, not only because of his inclusion in the Group of Eight, but from general considerations taking into account the fact that he is a consummate mystic, and Nietzsche loves mysticism, seeing it as a sine qua non for any philosopher. (This, by the way, explains Nietzsche’s disdain for English philosophy, which is, of course, glaringly short on mysticism!)

And indeed, Nietzsche lavishes praises on Empedocles, as comes through in this general discussion of the fatum libellorum, where Empedocles’ poetic work is deemed “wonderful,” although, admittedly, it has not come down to us in sufficient integrity to make a thorough judgment of its wonders:

“Some people presuppose a special providence for books, a fatum libellorum; such a providence, however, would at any rate be a very malicious one if it deemed it wise to withhold from us the works of Heraclitus, Empedocles’ wonderful poem, and the writings of Democritus, whom the ancients put on a par with Plato, whom he even excels as far as ingenuity goes, and as a substitute put into our hand Stoics, Epicureans and Cicero. Probably the most sublime part of Greek thought and its expression in words is lost to us.”

Concerning Empedocles’ ostentatious manner of dress and claims of divinity, Nietzsche looks at them in a favorable light too, in this discussion of the pride of Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Empedocles:

“…Never, for example, would one be able to imagine the pride of Heraclitus as an idle possibility. In itself, every endeavor after knowledge seems by its nature to be eternally unsatisfied and unsatisfactory; therefore nobody, unless instructed by history, will like to believe in such a royal self-esteem and conviction of being the only wooer of truth. Such people live in their own solar systems; one ought to look for them there… A Pythagoras, an Empedocles, treated themselves, too, with a superhuman esteem, yeah, with almost religious awe, but the tie of sympathy united with the great conviction of the metempsychosis, and the unity of every thing living, led them back to other humans for their welfare and salvation.”

There are also several important references to Empedocles in Nietzsche’s work Schopenhauer as Educator, and here they are:

“It will always be worth knowing what Empedocles, living as he did in the midst of the most vigorous and exuberant vitality of Greek culture, had to say about existence; his verdict possesses great weight especially as it has not been contradicted by a counter-verdict from any other great philosopher of the same era… He speaks the most clearly, but essentially (that is, if we listen carefully)--they are all saying the same thing.”

Now, approaching Schopenhauer’s attitude to life with an admiring mind, Nietzsche makes this important comparison between him and Empedocles:

What is life worth as such?-- it was no longer a confused and pallid age, and its hypocritical, uncertain life, upon which he (Schopenhauer) had to pass judgment. He knew that there was something higher and purer to be found and attained on this earth than the life of his own time, and that he who knows existence only in this ugly shape and assesses it accordingly does it a grave injustice. No, genius itself is now surmounted, so that one may hear whether genius, the highest fruit of life, can perhaps justify life as such; the glorious creative human being is now to answer the question: “Do you affirm this existence in the depths of your heart? Is it sufficient for you? Would you be its advocate, its redeemer? For you have only to pronounce a single heartfelt Yes! and life, though it faces such heavy accusations, shall go free!” What answer will he give?--- The answer of Empedocles!

In Menschliches, Nietzsche talks of the Empedoclean pessimism, but, again, in a favorable light:

“In all pessimistic religions, the act of procreation is felt to be bad per se, but this feeling is by no means a general, human one; not even the judgment of all pessimists is the same on this point. Thus, Empedocles, for instance, knows nothing of shame, devil, sin in things erotic; rather, on the great meadow of calamity, he sees one single salutary and hopeful apparition: Aphrodite. For him, she is the guarantee that strife will not prevail indefinitely, but will eventually give the scepter to a gentler daemon.”

…The next entry summarizes Bertrand Russell’s opinion of Parmenides.

INTO THE FIRE

Our next pre-Socratic giant is Empedocles, perhaps the most imaginative and entertaining thinker known to history. Born around 490 BC, he disappeared around 430 BC, purportedly, throwing himself into the crater of Etna, as the legend has it. He called himself a god (“I go about among you, an immortal god”), banished from the realm of other gods for some unspecified transgressions. (“One of these [rejected ones] I now am, an exile and a wanderer from the gods for that I put my trust in insensate strife.”) In life, he was supremely arrogant, as befitted a god. He dressed himself in flashy purple robes and wore bronze sandals (one of these sandals was later conspicuously found at the site of his demise, that is, at the place where he purportedly leaped into the fire of Mt. Etna), and he also claimed to have performed miracles. He was a mystic and a poet, curiously, the last Greek philosopher to write in verse (nota bene!). The extant fragments of his works are from two of his poems: Purifications and On Nature. The earliest account of his life, used in all his subsequent biographies, predictably belongs to our by now old acquaintance: the delightfully unreliable, but absolutely indispensable Diogenes Laertius.

In his ontology, Empedocles is different from all other philosophers before him, although a similarity with Heraclitus has been noticed by Plato, and mentioned in the Dialogue Sophist, alluding to him as the gentler muse, as opposed to Heraclitus, the severer muse:

Then there are Ionian and in more recent times Sicilian muses, who have arrived at the conclusion that to unite the two principles is safer, and to say that being is one and many and that these are held together by enmity and friendship, ever parting, ever meeting, as the-severer Muse asserts, while the gentler one does not insist on the perpetual strife and peace, but admits a relaxation and alternation of them; peace and unity sometimes prevailing under the sway of Aphrodite, and then again plurality and war, by reason of a principle of strife.

What Empedocles accomplishes in his extremely interesting ontological construct, is overcoming the main stumbling block over how one can possibly become many. To this end, he disposes of the physical monism of his predecessors, in favor of four original roots of every single thing in existence: earth, air, fire, water. These roots are eternal, uncreated, indestructible, and unchanging, just like the Parmenidean One. But, as there are four of them, they are able to combine in all sorts of combinations. Thus, according to his theory, all things in existence somehow consist of these four roots, particularly mixed. There are also two agents, or principles, involved in either the mixing or the separation They are love (philia) and strife (neikos):

The coming together of all things brings one generation into being and destroys it; as the other grows up and is scattered, all things become divided. And these things never cease continually changing places, at one time all uniting in one through Love, at another each carried in different directions by the repulsion of Strife. Thus, as far as it is their nature to grow into one out of many, and to become many once more, when the one is parted asunder, so far they come into being, and their life abides not. But inasmuch as they don’t ever cease changing their places continually, so far they are ever immovable as they go round the circle of existence. (Fragment 17.)

There is an interesting twist to this fantastic story. Apparently, there is no purpose in love’s conjoining of things, which is ruled only by chance and necessity. But some kind of natural selection determines which unions are viable (and they survive) and which are degenerate (and they don’t). Therefore, several modern authors have suggested that here Empedocles shows himself as a precursor of Darwinism in its survival of the fittest aspect.

But such precociousness is by no means a single such distinction of Empedocles. He was ahead of his time in many other respects as well. His theory that light travels at a finite but super-high speed, ought to speak for itself. He said that the moon shines by reflected light (which is true), unfortunately, saying the same of the sun (which is false). He was also correct in saying that solar eclipses were caused by the interpositions of the moon. His most notable empirical discovery established air as a physical substance as he observed a girl playing with a water-clock, dipping it into the water: “the stream does not flow into the vessel, but the bulk of the air inside keeps it out until she uncovers the compressed stream; but then the air escapes, and an equal volume of water runs in.” A related discovery of centrifugal force was made by him when he saw that a cup of water whirled around on a string keeps the water in.

Naturally, Empedocles is one of Nietzsche’s G8 (Group of Eight), and so, our next entry looks at what one genius has to say about the other.

INFINITY AND ETERNITY OF ONE

 Melissus of Samos is of a far lesser stature than the other members of the Eleatic school, and even by the kindest regard he does not measure up to his teacher Parmenides. Nietzsche’s works have no mention of his name, and our History of Philosophy of choice, by Bertrand Russell, is equally silent about him. However, this man did exist, and he was a bona fide pre-Socratic, which qualifies him for at least one short entry in this section.

The usually unreliable yet absolutely indispensable Diogenes Laertius writes of him as both a considerable thinker and a prominent citizen of his native Samos, who commanded a fleet which surprisingly defeated the Athenians in 442 BC. Whether Diogenes’ account can be trusted in this case is a minor matter, as we are interested in Melissus the philosopher, and not for his military or political prowess. As for whose pupil Melissus was, Diogenes names both Parmenides and Heraclitus as his teachers. Whereas the Parmenidean connection is generally established as a fact, Melissus’ connection to Heraclitus is certainly spurious, as the biographical dates for both do not seem to add up, even by Diogenes’s own arithmetic.

Among his extant Fragments, quoted by Simplicius, here are a few interesting samples:

1. What was, always was, and always shall be. For, if it came into being, necessarily, before its generation, there was nothing; so if there were nothing, nothing at all would come from nothing. (This offhand denial of even the least possibility of creatio ex nihilo clashes with the Christian doctrine, and thus, without making a judgment as to who is right and who is wrong, one thing at least is clear that creatio ex nihilo ought not to be dismissed so lightly as something impossible and self-evidently false. Thus with the basic premise of the Melissian doctrine formulated on such rationalistic ground, we can hardly expect from Melissus any mystical solutions to the problem of the Genesis, which is of course a deficiency. As for his general usefulness, see my closing comment. Having said that, Melissus’ deficiencies may make him less interesting than the greatest pre-Socratics, yet this is not a good reason to deny him his pre-Socratic value. A collection of ancient coins may contain items of sharply unequal value, but none of them ought to be discarded merely on that comparative basis. His extant fragments, even if somewhat deficient, allow us to follow Melissus’ line of thinking, which is in itself a treasure trove for modern thinkers.)

8i. If there were many things, they would have to be such as I say the one is. For if there is earth, and water, and air, and fire, and iron, and gold, and one living and another dead, and again black and white, and all the other things which people say are real, if indeed there are these and we see and hear correctly, each must be such as we first decided, and they cannot change or become different, but each is always as it is. (We may easily challenge Melissus’ logic in these fragments, perhaps too easily, but before we dismiss it altogether, let us remember that the outward silliness of Zeno’s famous Paradoxes has never prevented them from being studied in all seriousness for well over two thousand years, admittedly putting philosophers at a considerable loss to prove that the proposition that an athletic man can never overtake a tortoise in a race, if that tortoise has been given even the slightest of handicaps over him…)

8ii. But, as we say that we see and hear and perceive correctly, and yet it appears to us that the hot becomes cold, and the cold hot, and the hard soft, and the soft hard, and the living dies and there is birth from what is not living, and all these things change around and what a thing was and what it is now are not the same, but iron, which is hard, is rubbed away by contact with the finger, and also gold and stone, and whatever seems to us to be strong, and from water come earth and stone, so it happens that we do not understand what there is.

9. So if it exists it must be one; and being one, it could not have body. If it had any thickness, it would have parts, and would no longer be one.

10. If what exists is divided, it moves: and if it moves, it would not exist.

His arguments are generally derivative from Parmenides, and, where they are original, they do not add any substance to the Parmenidean doctrine, except to assert that the One is both infinite and eternal, which has a good point, but the demonstration is faulty, thus making it demonstrably unhelpful in unraveling some of the finer mysteries within the Parmenidean puzzle.

ACHILLES AND THE TURTLE

So, here, as promised, is the famous paradox of Zeno Eleaticus, known as Achilles and the Turtle. First we have the testimony of Aristotle, in Physics (3):

---The Achilles: “In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer has first to reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.”

Here is how this paradox is explained to young readers in schoolchildren’s textbooks:

“Suppose, Achilles is in a race with a tortoise. Achilles runs 10 times faster than the tortoise, but starts at point A, 100 yards behind the tortoise, at point T1. To overtake the tortoise, Achilles must first reach the point T1. However, when Achilles arrives at T1, the tortoise has moved 10 yards in front at point T2. Again Achilles runs to T2. But as before, as soon as he has covered the 10 yards, the tortoise is now a yard ahead of him, at point T3, and so on. Therefore, Achilles can never overtake the tortoise.”

In his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche talks about this infinitely more philosophically and elegantly as well:

Nothing infinite can exist, for to assume it, would yield the contradictory concept of a perfect infinity. Now since our reality, our world, everywhere bears the stamp of just such perfect infinity, the word signifies in its very nature a contradiction to logic and hence to the real and is therefore an illusion, a lie, a phantasm. Zeno especially makes use of indirect proof. He says, for example, “There can be no movement from one place to another, for if there were, we would have had a perfect infinity, but this is an impossibility. Achilles cannot catch up with the tortoise which has a small start over him, for in order to reach even the starting point of the tortoise, Achilles must have traversed innumerable, infinitely many spaces--- first, half of the interval, then, a fourth of it, an eighth, a sixteenth, and so on, ad infinitum. If he, in reality, does catch up with the tortoise, this is an illogical phenomenon, and not a real one. This is not true Being, but merely an illusion. For it is never possible to finish the infinite.”

As far as I am concerned, I remember thinking about the Achilles paradox at one time myself, and coming up with the following answer: In order to solve this puzzle we must divide the race track into a number of stages, equal or non-equal making no difference. As long as the number of these stages is finite, it is easy to see how Achilles will overtake the turtle on the way (unless the race handicap is so skewed that there is no physical chance for Achilles to run the whole course in less time than it takes the turtle to finish a few inches allotted to it by the organizers of the contest). If however the number of stages is infinite (assuming that each stage is measurable above zero, as otherwise, the division into stages should make no sense at all), we are embarking on an infinite journey, which cannot be finished in any time-limited, or even time-unlimited fashion. Please notice that in my argument I substitute Zeno’s infinitely small spaces by my own infinitely long stretch of a journey, without a bit altering the conditions set by Zeno himself. Indeed, when we deal with infinity, infinitely large and infinitely small are basically indistinguishable by the very nature of the concept.

ZENO THE TRICKSTER

The next member after Parmenides in Nietzsche’s Group of Eight ought to be Empedocles, but, before we get to him, two lesser luminaries of PreSocratica are going to be discussed, out of the chronological order, both being disciples of Parmenides and members of the so-called Eleatic school of philosophy, which goes back to Xenophanes as its founder, in some accounts, but in every account counts Parmenides as its by far most prominent representative. These two are Zeno of Elea and Melissus of Samos.

Zeno (490 BC? – 430 BC?) does not belong to the first rank of pre-Socratic philosophers, but his fame can be judged as second to none, because of a series of extremely clever paradoxes which he devised and which have become some of the best known and most quoted intellectual puzzles in history.

He first appears in a secondary role in Plato’s Dialogue Parmenides, where he is introduced as a disciple of Parmenides, twenty five years his junior, and, apparently, a “beloved” of his teacher, in their younger years. Later on, Aristotle gives him far more credit, calling him the inventor of the dialectic. Nietzsche gives him the credit of being more skillful than his teacher Parmenides, in his treatment of the concept of the infinite. Best known for his paradoxes, he has been quoted by almost every major philosopher, however, not always with an appropriate seriousness, but in the last hundred years this situation has changed, and a theoretical disputation with him has been one of the cornerstones of Henri Bergson’s philosophy. Incidentally, here is also the significant tribute paid to him by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica (1903):

“…In this capricious world, nothing is more capricious than posthumous fame. One of the most notable victims of posterity’s lack of judgment is Zeno. Having invented four arguments, all immeasurably subtle and profound, the grossness of subsequent philosophers pronounced him to be a mere ingenious juggler, and his arguments, to be one and all sophisms… After two thousand years of continual refutation, these sophisms were reinstated, and made the foundation of a mathematical renaissance…”

The following two examples of Zeno’s paradoxes testify to their essential seriousness, somewhat stripping away the entertainment element, which has made them so appealing, yet at the same time so delightfully frivolous. Their scientific value is, however, greatly enhanced by rubbing off the glamor. Yes, these paradoxes do seem absurd, which is why they are called paradoxes in the first place. But try to refute them, and it is the refuter who makes himself look silly and lightweight under the magnifying glass of scientific professionalism. As is customarily the case, we approach our pre-Socratics through the medium of Plato and Aristotle; in this case our source is Aristotle’s Physics (3):

The Dichotomy: Motion is impossible, since “that which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.”

The Arrow: “If everything, when it occupies an equal space, is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless.”

...Far more famous, due to its powerful entertaining quality, is the paradox of Achilles and the Turtle, which will become the subject of a separate entry, which follows next.

PARMENIDES AND NIETZSCHE

In the G8 (‘Group of Eight’) of Nietzsche’s “pre-Socratic” philosophers (actually, from Thales to Socrates), Parmenides immediately follows Nietzsche’s darling Heraclitus, and occupies some considerable space in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.

Parmenides is the antipode of Heraclitus, and as such he comes out in Nietzsche’s work:

While each word of Heraclitus expresses the pride and the majesty of truth, but truth grasped in intuitions, rather than attained by the rope ladder of logic, while--in Sibylline rapture--Heraclitus gazes, but does not peer, knows, but does not calculate, his contemporary Parmenides stands beside him as the counter-image, likewise expressing a type of truth-teller, but one formed of ice, rather than fire, pouring cold piercing light all around. Once in his life, Parmenides, probably at a fairly advanced age, had a moment of purest, totally bloodless abstraction, unclouded by any reality. This moment— un-Greek as no other in the two centuries of the Tragic Age—whose product is the doctrine of Being, became for Parmenides’ own life the boundary stone that separates two periods. At the same time, however, this moment divides all pre-Socratic thinking into two halves. The first may be called the Anaximandrian period, the second,-- the Parmenidean period proper. The first, older period of Parmenides’ own philosophizing still bears some Anaximandrian traces; it has brought forth an organized philosophical-physical system in answer to Anaximander’s questions. When later Parmenides was seized by that icy tremor of abstraction, and came face to face with his utterly simple proposition as to being and non-being, all his own previous teachings joined the rubbish-heap of the older doctrines. Still, he seems not to have lost every trace of paternal goodwill toward the sturdy and well-made child of his youth, and he helped himself out by saying, “There is only one right way, to be sure, but if one wishes for a change, to try another, then, my former view, as to quality and consistency, is the only right one.” Guarding himself by this approach, he awarded his former physical system a dignified and extensive position, even in that great poem On Nature, that was meant to proclaim his new insight as really the only way of truth. This paternal solicitude, even considering that it might have crept in by error, presents the only trace of human sentiment in a nature wholly petrified by logical rigidity and almost transformed into a thinking machine.

Thus, according to Nietzsche, both Heraclitus and Parmenides started their positions from Anaximander’s big question, but took entirely opposite routes. Parmenides compared qualities, and believed that he found them not equal, but divided into two rubrics. Comparing, for example, light and dark, he found the dark but the negation of the light. Thus, he differentiates between the positive and negative qualities, while seriously attempting to find and note this basic contradictory principle throughout all nature. His method was like this: he took several contradictories, such as light and heavy, rare and dense, active and passive,--- and held them against his original model contradictories light and dark. Whatever corresponded to light, was then the positive quality, whatever corresponded to dark, the negative. Taking heavy and light, for example, light [in the sense of weightless] was apportioned to light, heavy to dark, and thus heavy seemed to him the negation of weightless, however, weightlessness seemed a positive quality. The method exhibits a defiant talent for abstract-logical procedure, closed against all influences of sensation. Because heaviness seems to urge itself upon the senses as a positive quality; this did not prevent Parmenides from labeling it as a negation. He also designated earth against fire, cold against warm, dense against rare, feminine against masculine, and passive against active, to be negatives. Thus before his gaze our world divides into two spheres: one characterized by light, fieriness, warmth, weightlessness, rarefaction, activity, and masculinity, the other, by the opposite, negative qualities. The latter really express only the lack, the absence of the former. Instead of the words ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ he used the absolute terms ‘existent’ and ‘nonexistent.’ Now he had arrived at the principle, Anaximander notwithstanding, that our world contains something which is existent, as well as something which is nonexistent. The existent should therefore not be sought outside the world and beyond our horizon. Right here before us, everywhere, in all coming-to-be, there is contained an active something which is existent.

But now he was left with the task of formulating a more exact answer to the question “What is coming-to-be?” —and here we shall enter the fog, the mysticism of qualitas occulta and even, just a little, the realm of mythology. Parmenides, like Heraclitus, gazes at universal coming-to-be and at impermanence, and he can interpret passing away only as though it were a fault of nonexistence. For how could the existent be guilty of passing away?! But coming-to-be, too, must be produced with the help of the nonexistent, for the existent is always there. Of and by itself it couldn’t come-to-be nor could it explain coming-to-be. Hence coming-to-be as well as passing away would seem to be produced by the negative qualities. But, since that which comes-to-be has a content that is lost in the process of passing away, it presupposes that the positive qualities (for they are the essence of such content), likewise participate in both processes of change. To sum up, we now have the dictum “For coming-to-be, both the existent and the nonexistent are necessary; when they interact, we have a coming-to-be.” But how are the positive and the negative to get together? Shouldn’t they forever flee each other, as contradictories, and thus make all coming-to-be impossible?… Parmenides now appeals to a qualitas occulta, the mystic tendency of opposites to attract and unite, and he symbolizes the opposition in the name of Aphrodite and the empirically well-known relationship between masculinity and femininity. The power of Aphrodite weds the opposites, existent with nonexistent! Desire unites the contradictory and mutually repellent elements: the result is coming-to-be. When desire is satiated, inner opposition and hatred drives the existent and the nonexistent apart once more, and man says, “All things pass.”

Now, here is a profoundly poetic Nietzschean description of Parmenidean philosophy, as poetic as it can get, and despite its poetic verbosity non-essential in a dried-out synoptical abstract, I cannot resist the great temptation of quoting from it at some length, even if it may bloat my entry beyond reasonable limits.---

And now, whenever Parmenides glances backward, at the world of come-to-be, he becomes angry with his eyes for so much as seeing come-to-be, with his ears for hearing it. “Whatever you do, do not be guided by your dull eyes, nor by your resounding ears, nor by your tongue, but test all things with the power of your thinking alone!” Thus he accomplished the momentous first critique of man’s apparatus of knowledge, an inadequate critique as yet, but doomed to bear dire consequences. By wrenching apart the senses and the capacity for abstraction, he demolished intellect, encouraging man to indulge in the erroneous distinction between spirit and body, which, since Plato, lies upon philosophy like a curse. All sense perceptions, says Parmenides, yield but illusions. And the main illusoriness lies in the pretense that the nonexistent coexists with the existent, that Becoming, too, has Being. All the manifold colorful world known to experience, all the transformations of its qualities, all the orderliness of its ups and downs, are cast aside mercilessly, as mere semblance and illusion. Nothing may be learned from them. All effort spent upon this false deceitful world which is futile and negligible, faked into a lying existence by the senses, is therefore wasted. When one makes as total a judgment as does Parmenides about the world as a whole, one is no longer a scientist. One’s sympathy toward phenomena atrophies; there develops a hatred for phenomena including oneself, a hatred for being unable to get rid of the everlasting deceitfulness of sensation. Henceforth, the truth shall live only in the palest, abstracted generalities, in the empty husks of the most indefinite terms, as though in a house of cobwebs. And beside such truth now sits our philosopher bloodless like his abstractions in the spun out fabric of his formulae. While a spider at least wants blood from its victims the Parmenidean philosopher hates most the blood of his victims, the blood of the empirical reality, sacrificed and shed by him.

This entry would have been sorely incomplete had we failed to quote another passage, this time from a late-late Nietzsche, namely, from his Wille zur Macht (#539), where he chooses to contrast his own paradox to a Parmenidean one: “Parmenides said, ‘One cannot think of what is not’; we are at the other extreme, and say, ‘What can be thought of, must certainly be a fiction.’”

This is indeed a paradox, for we are familiar with another wording of the Parmenidean maxim: “What cannot be thought of, does not exist.” To put the two maxims side by side, we come up with yet another quasi-absurdity: “All that exists is fiction.” Let us not play the juvenile rationalist who dismissed all fairytales and fables on the grounds that toads never talk like humans. Here is a delightful intellectual challenge that must not be dismissed, because without such food for thought our brain will starve to death…

As always, Nietzsche displays a profound depth and originality of his thinking, but the fact that he finds a fertile ground for his original thinking in Parmenides, whether he disagrees with him or not, serves as an appropriate tribute to that great Greek, whose genius for stimulating ensuing millennia of advanced philosophical thinking is again demonstrated in Nietzsche’s final tribute.

FROM PARMENIDES TO HEGEL

Our historico-philosophical authority of choice, Lord Bertrand Russell, is not particularly generous toward Parmenides, allotting him a relatively small chapter in his History of Western Philosophy, and using more than half of it on his own hobby, which is his special take on linguistics, also known as logical analysis.

But what he manages to say about Parmenides proper is both interesting and valuable. So, here it is in my summary. He starts with a short summary of his own.

What makes Parmenides historically important is that he invented a form of metaphysical argument that, in one form or another, is to be found in most subsequent metaphysicians, down to, and including, Hegel. He is often said to have invented logic, but what he really invented was metaphysics based on logic.

I have to pause here, to ask Russell the following legitimate question:

If, as you say, what he actually invented was not logic itself, but only a metaphysics based on logic, which assumes that logic had already been in place in Greece (I am obviously sticking to the history of Western philosophy here, being not qualified enough to discuss Oriental philosophy of China and India) by the time of Parmenides, who, then, had been the inventor of logic as such, assuming that logic did not invent itself? (We are surely not talking about Aristotle as the traditionally credited inventor of formal logic either, for the simple reason that Aristotle was substantially posterior to Parmenides, and Russell quite naturally assumes that the invention of logic was not posterior to Parmenides.)

The doctrine of Parmenides was set forth in his poem On Nature. He considered the senses deceptive, and condemned the multitude of sensible things as mere illusion. The only true being is The One-- infinite and indivisible. It is not, as in Heraclitus, a union of opposites, since there are no opposites. Parmenides does not conceive The One as we conceive God; he seems to think of it as material and extended in the form of a sphere. But it cannot be divided, because the whole of it is present everywhere.

(As a matter of fact, The One is never referred to by Parmenides in theological terms. On the other hand, his teacher of truth, in the poem On Nature is a “goddess.” But I would not put too much trust in words here. The goddess is only an agent of learning, while The One, although material and extended, and never referred to as God, implies a supernatural force behind it, and, considering that Parmenides was ever since his youth strongly influenced by Xenophanes, and at no time has apparently repudiated the latter’s strong theological bias, the existence of an implied Xenophanian Deity behind Parmenidean Cosmos may be safely assumed.)

Russell next concentrates on the Parmenidean Way of Truth, dismissing the Doxa (Way of Opinion) out of hand. He summarizes the argument here as follows:

“You 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. The thing that can be thought and that for the sake of which the thought exists is the same; for you cannot find thought without something that is, as to which it is uttered.” The essence of this argument is: When you think, you think of something; when you use a name, it must be the name of something. Therefore, both thought and language require objects to exist outside themselves. And since you can think of a thing, or speak of it at different times, whatever can be thought of, or spoken of, must exist at all times. Consequently there can be no change. This is the first example in philosophy of an argument from thought and language to the world at large. It can’t of course be accepted as valid, but it is worthwhile to see what element of truth it contains. We can put the argument in this way: if language is not nonsense, words must mean something, and in general they must not mean just other words, but something that is there, whether we talk of it or not.

In this reasoning, Russell admits that Parmenides is right. But where the great Greek goes off track is that he does not see that the meanings of the words are all subject to change, both in the course of time, that is, diachronically, as well as in their very naughty propensity to mean different things to different people at the same time, that is, synchronically. Here Russell the linguist is right, of course, and he goes on to explain at great length why he is right, which details are outside the scope of our present inquiry.

Russell concludes his Parmenidean Chapter by reminding the reader that philosophical theories, if they are important, can generally be revived in a new form after being refuted as originally stated. What subsequent philosophy was to accept from Parmenides, was not the impossibility of all change, which was too violent a paradox, but the indestructibility of substance. The word “substance” itself did not occur in his immediate successors, but the concept is present in their speculations. A substance was supposed to be the persistent subject of varying predicates. As such, it became, and would remain for more than two thousand years, one of the fundamental concepts of philosophy, psychology, physics, and theology.

And with this tribute to the importance of Parmenidean theories, their apparent absurdity notwithstanding, Bertrand Russell concludes his Chapter on Parmenides.

PERMANENCE OVER CHANGE

From all we know about him, Heraclitus had a huge ego, and our next great pre-Socratic, Parmenides, had one no less than his immediate predecessor. No doubt then that he, Parmenides, could not be satisfied with a single word uttered by Heraclitus, and he formulated a theory even weirder, and ostensibly more absurd, than the one glorifying change at the expense of permanence. With Parmenides, it is permanence forever, and the devil may take the change!

Nothing ever changes is indeed a much greater absurdity than the absolute denial of permanence, espoused by Heraclitus. Yet, even an absurdity can be great at the level of greatness, and Parmenides unquestionably stands at that level.

Parmenides, a citizen of Elea, was born about 515 BC to a rich and noble family, and was still alive in 450 BC, when, at the age of sixty-five, he along with Zeno visited Athens, where, according to Plato’s Dialogue Parmenides, they met a group of Athenian philosophers, which included a very young Socrates. From his early youth, Parmenides devoted himself to philosophy, was associated with members of the Pythagorean society, and is sometimes called a Pythagorean by later writers. In his youth, he was greatly influenced by his fellow Eleatic Xenophanes who was an old man by then. Parmenidean famous poetic work On Nature, written by him in those early years, has been acknowledged as influenced by Xenophanes’ teachings.

As a citizen of Elea, he was held in high regard, particularly for the laws he made, which resulted in peace and prosperity for the city, but also for his exemplary life, which was immortalized in the Greek expression Parmenidean life. The morality of Parmenidean life is however rather questionable by common standards, as he might have been infected with that all-pervasive Old Greek vice, matter-of-factly hinted in Plato’s Dialogue Parmenides: Zeno was nearly 40 years of age, tall and fair to look upon, in the days of his youth he was reported to have been beloved by Parmenides.

As I said previously, Parmenides lived and wrote soon after Heraclitus, and he made it a point to contradict him forcefully every step of the way. Fragments #6 and #8 contain this unmistakable allusion to Heraclitus. I quote them here in Nietzsche’s imaginative rendition:

We are, and at the same time are not. Being and nonbeing is at the same time the same, and not the same… all things travel in opposite directions… Away with the people who seem to have two heads, and yet know nothing! Everything is in flux with them, including their thinking! They stand in dull astonishment before things, yet must be deaf, as well as blind, to mix up the opposites the way they do!

What Parmenides achieved, by virtue of his acerbic criticism of Heraclitus, was to reduce all Milesian and later monism to the question of how the emergence of many from the original one can be possible. He had his answer, absurd from the point of view of common sense, yet perfectly consistent from the point of view of pure logic: Change is a logical impossibility, therefore, there can be no change.

In order to explain what normal people call change, and happen to see all around them, he resorts to some heavy metaphysics, namely, that what they see as change is only an illusion, whereas the real being is not subject to change: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal, and unchangeable.

Parmenidean philosophy because of its admitted commonsense absurdity may seem to have been doomed to be ridiculed and dismissed for all time to come, yet nothing of the kind has happened. The big question of Permanence and Change has never been given a satisfactory answer, while echoes of Parmenides have kept on reverberating through philosophy into modern times, while even a cursory look at Plato’s theories, and at his doctrine of ideas, should immediately raise the Parmenidean shadow behind them, in our eyes, and, sure enough, no one yet has dared to accuse Platonism of any comparable level of absurdity as the one which we are more than ready to find in Parmenides. Generally speaking, this is a powerful confirmation of what we have called a stimulating challenge to our thinking. Along with his disciple Zeno’s paradoxes, his idea of permanence at the expense of change is a giant paradox, which helps the human mind to move on forward, toward the goal of addressing the most complicated issues raised by modern science. None of the latter, as we have seen, gets any more sophisticated or complex than those analyzed in more general terms by Parmenides and by the other pre-Socratics.

MIMICS AND GESTURE THEATER.

(The title of this entry jokingly borrows the name of the theater for deaf people in Moscow.)

Once again we need to ask the same question. Nietzsche and Russell are silent about him. He is sometimes identified as a sophist and by no means a pre-Socratic… So, why Cratylus, and why in this particular spot? There is not much known about him, to put it mildly, and from what we do know, a question may arise as to whether there is a good enough reason for knowing anything about him at all. Our primary sources are Plato’s Dialogue The Cratylus and Aristotle’s Metaphysic, but even from these, Cratylus does not seem to amount to a lot. Yet, two interesting subjects are raised in connection with him, and there is even the term Cratylism, referring to a philosophical theory, which originates if not with him personally then at least certainly around his name. In other words, he does deserve our attention, and a separate entry as well.

He is known as a follower of Heraclitus, but he is also said to be a pupil of the famous sophist Protagoras. Plato was a pupil of his before he met Socrates, and apparently treated him with great respect. Some historiographers of philosophy place him among the sophists, due to that association with Protagoras, but this does not make much sense to me, therefore I have placed him after Heraclitus, disassociating him from the Protagoreans.

Cratylus is interesting because of two things. He pushes the Heraclitean theory of the flux to a wild extreme and he also comes up with a theory of language all of his own, which has a remarkable relevance to modern linguistics. His Heraclitean ties are examined by Aristotle. His linguistic theory is examined by Socrates, in the above-mentioned Plato’s Dialogue.

First here is Aristotle on Cratylus:

[Cratylus] “ended up by thinking that one need not say anything, and only moved his finger; and [he] criticized Heraclitus for saying that one cannot enter the same river twice, for he himself held that it cannot be done even once.” (Metaphysics 1010a).

Here in a single sentence we find both Cratylus’ logical “improvement” on Heraclitus, and also his linguistic extremism resulting from the former. Indeed, he seems to have believed that nothing truthful can be said of the things that change, because by the time our words are said, the things about which they are said have changed. In order to refrain from making untrue statements, Cratylus’ solution is to say nothing at all. Ergo, the mimics and gesture theater!

In Plato’s Dialogue Cratylus, the latter knows better than to communicate by gesticulation and mimics. His linguistic theory is set out in fairly comprehensible human speech, and it boils down to the assertion that the names by which we know things are not given to them randomly and merely by convention, but have in fact an intrinsic connection to those things. Names are thus of divine origin, and by studying them we can arrive at knowledge. The thing which makes the most sense here is that once we cannot “know” things by talking about them, there has to be another way of gaining knowledge, which is by analyzing the esoteric meanings of them. Cratylus’ idea is not as insane and inane as it may first appear, for his approach allows us to pursue the study of verbal etymology, which is rendered useless by adopting the opposing conventionist approach.

And finally, on the subject of “Cratylism” in modern usage, it represents a kind of linguistic theory based on three underlying principles: (1) the imitation principle (each fact imitates things); (2) the analogy principle (each fact is carried out in an analogous manner); and (3) the protolanguage principle (each language proceeds from the original and perfect language by degradation).

…Well, Cratylus has proved himself worthy of our attention, after all.