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.