Judaism
Parmenides of Elea
Abstract
Contents Updated: Monday, January 24, 2000
Parmenides of Elea (c 511 BC)
Xenophon’s great disciple, Parmenides of Elea, affirmed the one unchanging existence to be alone true and capable of being conceived, and multitude and change to be an appearance without reality. This doctrine was defended by his younger countryman Zeno in a polemic against the common opinion, which sees in things multitude, becoming and change.
The Second Part of the poem of Parmenides was a sketch of contemporary Pythagorean cosmology. The entire history of Pythagoreanism up to the end of the fifth century BC is certainly conjectural, but, if we find in Parmenides ideas wholly unconnected with his own view of the world, and if we find precisely the same ideas in later Pythagoreanism, the most natural inference will be that the later Pythagoreans derived these views from their predecessors, and that they formed part of the original stock-in-trade of the Society. This will be confirmed if they are developments of certain features in the old Ionian cosmology.
Pythagoras was not particularly original in his cosmological views. The idea of the world breathing came from Anaximenes, and traces of Anaximander are also found. Aristotle says that the two elements of Parmenides were the Warm and the Cold. Here, then, are the traditional “opposites” of the Milesians. Simplicius, who had the poem before him, after mentioning Fire and Earth, Aristotle’s interpretation of warm and cold, at once adds “or rather Light and Darkness”. Parmenides himself calls one “form” Light, Flame, and Fire, and the other Night, and we have now to consider whether these can be identified with the Pythagorean Limit and Unlimited.
The idea of the world breathing will not have belonged to the earliest form of Pythagoreanism, and “boundless breath” can simply be identified with Darkness, which stands well for the Unlimited. “Air” or mist was always regarded as the dark element. That which gives definiteness to the vague darkness is certainly light or fire. The Pythagorean distinction between the Limit and the Unlimited therefore made its first appearance in this crude form.
The word “stephanai” can mean “rims” or “brims” but not spheres. The solid circle which surrounds all the crowns is also not to be regarded as spherical. The expression “like a wall” would be highly inappropriate in that case. The “wheels” of Anaximander, seems to be meant and Pythagoras probably adopted the theory from him. In Plato’s Myth of Er, Pythagorean in character, does not have spheres, but “lips” of concentric whorls fitted into one another like a nest of boxes. The Timaeus has no spheres either, but bands or strips crossing each other at an angle. The Homeric Hymn to Ares, apparently composed under Pythagorean influence, uses as the word for the orbit of the planet “antux,” which must mean “rim”.
There is no evidence that anyone ever adopted the theory of celestial spheres, till Aristotle turned the geometrical construction which Eudoxus had set up as a hypothesis “to save appearances” into real things. At this date, spheres would not have served to explain anything that could not be explained more simply without them. These “bands” encircle one another or are folded over one another, and are made of the rare and the dense element. Between them are “mixed bands” made up of light and darkness. Light and darkness are exactly the same thing as the rare and the dense.
Parmenides says:
In the middle of those is the goddess who steers the course of all things.
Simplicius declares that this means in the middle of all the bands, in the center of the world. The words of Parmenides are ambiguous, however. Simplicius identified this goddess with the Pythagorean Hestia or central fire. Theophrastus dissented because he knew and stated that Parmenides described the earth as round and in the center of the world. Theophrastus, excludes the identification of the goddess with the central fire. It does not seem fitting to place a goddess to the middle of a solid spherical earth.
Aetius says this goddess was called Ananke and the “Holder of Lots.” She “steers the course of all things,” and so regulates the motions of the celestial bands. Simplicius adds that she sends souls at one time from the light to the unseen world, at another from the unseen world to the light. This is precisely what the goddess does in the Myth of Er, Pythagorean ground. Ananke took the heavens and compelled them to hold fast the fixed courses of the stars, and she is the beginner of all pairing and birth. Lastly, she created Eros first of all the gods. So in Empedocles it is an ancient oracle or decree of Ananke that causes the gods to fall and become incarnate in a cycle of births.
The place this goddess occupies in the universe would be clearer if we knew where Ananke is in the Myth of Er. According to Theophrastus, she occupied a position midway between the earth and the heavens. The statement of Aetius, that apparently said she was in the middle of the mixed bands, undoubtedly implies that she was between earth and heaven. She is identified with one of the bands in a somewhat confused passage of Cicero, and the whole theory of wheels or bands was probably suggested by the Milky Way. The Milky Way must be a band intermediate between those of the Sun and the Moon.
According to some it was Pythagoras, and according to others Parmenides, who discovered the identity of the evening and morning star. Parmenides went on to describe how the other gods were born and how they fell, an Orphic idea that might have been Pythagorean.
In describing the views of his contemporaries, Parmenides was obliged to say a good deal about physiological matters. Like everything else, man was composed of the warm and the cold, and death was caused by the removal of the warm. Males came from the right side and females from the left. Women had more of the warm and men of the cold, a view Empedocles contradicted. It is the proportion of the warm and cold in men that determines the character of their thought, so that even corpses, from which the warm has been removed, retain a perception of what is cold and dark.
One of medicine’s leading schools must have been in close relation with the Pythagorean Society. Even before the days of Pythagoras, Croton was famous for its doctors. A distinguished medical writer lived at Croton in the days between Pythagoras and Parmenides, and it seems the physiological views described by Parmenides were not isolated curiosities, but landmarks by which we can trace the origin and growth of one of the most influential of medical theories, that which explains health as a balance of opposites.
Empedocles of Acragas (c 495-435 BC)
Empedocles estimated the moon’s distance was one third the distance to the stellar sphere. He called the elements gods, for all the early thinkers had spoken in this way of whatever they regarded as the primary substance. We must remember that the word is not used in a religious sense. Empedocles did not pray or sacrifice to the elements.
Empedocles was a citizen of Agrigentum in Sicily. His date is roughly fixed for us by the well-attested fact that he went to Thourioi shortly after its foundation in 444/3 BC. He was, therefore, contemporary with the meridian splendour of the Periclean age at Athens, and he must have met Herodotus and Protagoras at Thourioi. He was distinguished not only as a philosopher, but also for his knowledge of natural history and medicine, and as a poet and statesman.
After the death of his father Meto, who was a wealthy citizen of Agrigentum, he acquired great weight among his fellow-citizens by espousing the popular party and favoring democratic measures. His became so important in the state that he assumed several of the distinctions of royalty, particularly a purple robe, a golden girdle, a Delphic crown, and a train of attendants.
He combined scientific study with a mystical religion of the Orphic type, but he differed from Pythagoras in the direction his scientific inquires took, focusing on medicine, rather than mathematics. That accounts for the physiological interest that marks his speculations.
The skill which he possessed in medicine and natural philosophy allowed him to perform many wonders, which he passed upon the multitude for miracles. He is said to have:
- driven away noxious winds from his country and thereby put a stop to epidemic diseases;
- checked, by the power of music, the madness of a young man who was threatening his enemy with instant death;
- restored a woman to life who had lain breathless thirty days;
and to have done many other things, equally astonishing, after the manner of Pythagoras. Because of all this he was an object of universal admiration.
Besides medical skill Empedocles possessed poetical talents. The fragments of his verses are scattered throughout the ancient writers, and Fabricius is of opinion that he was the real author of those ancient fragments which bear the name of the “Golden Verses of Pythagoras.”. His principal works were a didactic poem on Nature (Peri Phuseos), and another entitled Katharmoi, which seems to have recommended virtuous conduct as a means of averting disease.
Gorgias of Leontini, the well-known orator, known as the “the Nihilist,” was his pupil, from where it may seem reasonable to infer that Empedocles was a master of the art of eloquence. According to the common account he threw himself into the burning crater of Etna, in order that the manner of his death might not be known, and that he might afterwards pass for a god, but the secret was discovered by means of one of his brazen sandals, which was thrown out from the mountain in a subsequent eruption of the volcano. This story is rejected, however, as fictitious by Strabo and other writers. According to Aristotle he died at sixty years of age.
His views in philosophy are variously given. By some he is called a Pythagorean, in consequence of a resemblance of doctrine in a few unessential points. But the principles of his theory evidently show that he belongs to the Eleatic School. He unreservedly accepts the doctrine of Parmenides that what isis uncreated and indestructible, and he only escapes from the further conclusions of the Eleatic by introducing the theory of elements or roots. Of these he assumed four—fire, air, earth, and water,—and in some respects this was a return to primitive views which the Milesians had already left behind them.
Empedocles discovered that what we call atmospheric air was a body, and was quite distinct from empty space or from vapor or mist. This he did by means of an experiment with the water-clock. He showed that air could keep water out of a vessel, and that the water could only enter as the air escaped.
Besides these four “roots,” Empedocles postulated something called Love(philia) to explain the attraction of different forms of matter, and of something called Strife(neikos) to account for their separation. He speaks of these quite distinctly as bodies. We start with something like the sphere of Parmenides, in which the four elements are mingled in a sort of solution by Love, while Strife surrounds the sphere on the outside. When Strife begins to enter the Sphere, Love is driven towards its center, and the four elements are gradually separated from one another.
That is an adaptation of the old idea of the world breathing. Empedocles also held that respiration depended on the systole and diastole of the heart, and as soon as Strife has penetrated to the lowest (or most central) part of the sphere, and Love is confined to the middle of it, the reverse process begins. Love expands and Strife is driven outwards, passing out of the Sphere once more in proportion as Love occupies more and more of it. In fact, Love and Strife are to the world what blood and air are to the body.
Empedocles taught that originally All was one, a God eternal and at rest, a sphere and a mixture (sphairos, migma), without a vacuum, in which the elements of things were held together in indistinguishable confusion by love, the primal force which unites the like to like. In a portion of this whole, however, or, as he expresses it, in the members of the Deity, strife, the force which binds like to unlike, prevailed, and gave the elements a tendency to separate themselves, whereby the first became perceptible as such, although the separation was not so complete but that each contained portions of the others. Hence arose the multiplicity of things.
The origin of organic life was ascribed to the increasing action of Strife. At the beginning of this world there were undifferentiated living masses, which were gradually differentiated, the fittest surviving. Empedocles also described how mortal beings arose in the period when Love was gaining the master, and when everything happened in just the opposite way to what we see in our world.
The limbs and organs first arose in separation, and were then joined together at haphazard, so that monsters were produced, “oxen with heads of men and men with heads of oxen.” This strange picture of a reversed evolution may possible have been suggested by the Egyptian monuments.
But, as the forces of love and hate are constantly acting upon each other for generation or destruction, the present condition of things cannot persist forever, and the world which, properly, is not the All, but only the ordered part of it, will again be reduced to a chaotic unity, out of which a new system will be formed, and so on forever. There is no real destruction of anything, but only a change of combinations.
A world of perishable things such as we know can only exist when both Love and Strife are in the world. There will, therefore, be two births and two passings away of mortal things, one when Love is increasing and all the elements are coming together into one, the other when Strife is re-entering the Sphere and the elements are being separated once more. The elements alone are everlasting, the particular things we know are unstable compounds, which come into being as the elements “run through one another” in one direction or another. They are mortal or perishable just because they have no substance of their own, only the “four roots” have that. There is, therefore, no end to their death and destruction. Their birth is a mixture and their death is but the separation of what has been mixed. Nothing is imperishable but fire, air, earth and water, with the two forces of Love and Strife.
Of the elements (which he is the first we know to have described as four distinct species of matter), fire, as the rarest and most powerful, he held to be the chief, and consequently, the soul of all sentient and intellectual beings which issue from the central fire, or soul of the world. The soul migrates through animal and vegetable bodies in atonement for some guilt committed in its disembodied state when it is a demon, of which he supposed that an infinite number existed. The seat of a demon, when in a human body, is the blood.
Closely connected with this view of the objects of knowledge was his theory of human knowledge. In the impure separation of the elements it is only the predominant one that the senses can apprehend; and, consequently, though man can know all the elements of the whole singly, he is unable to see them in their perfect unity, wherein consists their truth. Empedocles therefore rejects the testimony of the sensed, and maintains that pure intellect alone can arrive at a knowledge of the truth. This is the attribute of the Deity, for man cannot overlook the work of love in all its extent, and the true unity is open only to itself. Hence he was led to distinguish between the world as presented to our senses (kosmos aisthetos) and its type, the intellectual world (kosmos noetos). Lucretius, who praises Empedocles highly even while criticizing his philosophy, appears to have taken him as a model.
We have little information as to how Empedocles explained the constitution of particular things. He regarded the four elements, which could be combined in an indefinite number of portions, as adequate to explain them all, and he referred in this connexion to the great variety painters can produce with only four pigments. He saw, however, that some combinations are possible, while others are not. Water mixes easily with wine, but not with oil.
