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.