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.