Mistake of supposing Zeno’s reductiones ad absurdum of an opponents doctrines to be generalisations of data gathered from experience.
But the purport of Zeno’s reasoning is mistaken, when he is conceived as one who wishes to delude his hearers by proving both sides of a contradictory proposition. Zeno’s contradictory conclusions are elicited with the express purpose of disproving the premisses from which they are derived. For these premisses Zeno himself is not to be held responsible, since he borrows them from his opponents: a circumstance which Aristotle forgets, when he censures the Zenonian arguments as paralogisms, because they assume the Continua, Space, and Time, to be discontinuous or divided into many distinct parts.[28] Now this absolute discontinuousness of matter, space, and time, was not advanced by Zeno as a doctrine of his own, but is the very doctrine of his opponents, taken up by him for the purpose of showing that it led to contradictory consequences, and thus of indirectly refuting it. The sentence of Aristotle is thus really in Zeno’s favour, though apparently adverse to him. In respect to motion, a similar result followed from the Zenonian reasonings; namely, to show That motion, as an attribute of the Real and Absolute, was no less inconsistent with the hypothesis of those who opposed Parmenides, than with the hypothesis of Parmenides himself:—That absolute motion could no more be reconciled with the doctrine of the discontinuous Many, than with that of the Continuous One:—That motion therefore was only a phenomenal fact, relative to our sensations, conceptions, and comparisons; and having no application to the absolute. In this phenomenal point of view, neither Zeno nor Parmenides nor Melissus disputed the fact of motion. They recognised it as a portion of the world of sensation and experience; which world they tried to explain, well or ill, by analogies and conjectures derived from itself.
[28] Aristotel. Physic. vi. 9, p. 239 b. Ζήνων δὲ παραλογίζεται· οὐ γὰρ σύγκεται ὁ χρόνος ἐκ τῶν νῦν ὄντων τῶν ἀδιαιρέτων, ὥσπερ οὐδ’ ἄλλο μέγεθος οὐδέν &c.
Aristotle, in the second and third chapters of his Physica, canvasses and refutes the doctrine of Parmenides and Zeno respecting Ens and Unum. He maintains that Ens and Unum are equivocal — πολλαχῶς λεγόμενα. He farther maintained that no one before him had succeeded in refuting Zeno. See the Scholia of Alexander ad Sophistic. Elench. p. 320 b. 6, ed. Brandis.
Zenonian Dialectic — Platonic Parmenides.
Though we have not the advantage of seeing the Zenonian dialectics as they were put forth by their author, yet if we compare the substance of them as handed down to us, with those dialectics which form the latter half of the Platonic dialogue called Parmenides, we shall find them not inferior in ingenuity, and certainly more intelligible in their purpose. Zeno furnishes no positive support to the Parmenidean doctrine, but he makes out a good negative case against the counter-doctrine.
Views of historians of philosophy respecting Zeno.
Zeller and other able modern critics, while admitting the reasoning of Zeno to be good against this counter-doctrine, complain that he takes it up too exclusively; that One and Many did not exclude each other, and that the doctrines of Parmenides and his opponents were both true together, but neither of them true to the exclusion of the other. But when we reflect that the subject of predication on both sides was the Real (Ens per se) it was not likely that either Parmenides or his opponents would affirm it to be both absolutely One and Continuous, and absolutely Many and Discontinuous.[29] If the opponents of Parmenides had taken this ground, Zeno need not have imagined deductions for the purpose of showing that their hypothesis led to contradictory conclusions; for the contradictions would have stood avowedly registered in the hypothesis itself. If a man affirms both at once, he divests the predication of its absolute character, as belonging unconditionally to Ens per se; and he restricts it to the phenomenal, the relative, the conditioned — dependent upon our sensations and our fluctuating point of view. This was not intended either by Parmenides or by his opponents.
[29] That both of them could not be true respecting Ens per se, seems to have been considered indisputable. See the argument of Sokrates in the Parmenides of Plato, p. 129 B-E.