A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Ancient and Mediæval Philosophy

by Herbert Ernest Cushman

All thinking refers to something thought, and therefore has Being for its content;

Thinking that refers to nothing, and is therefore contentless, cannot be;

Therefore, not-Being cannot be thought, much less can it be.

These propositions look very abstract, and make us believe that we are to plunge immediately into a kind of German idealism. But Parmenides leaves us in no doubt that he is one of the hylozoists of his time. Being is indeed thought, but Being is also matter. We may therefore amend our equation to Being ＝ Thought＝ Matter. Being is what fills space, and all Being has this and only this property. All Being is therefore exactly alike, and there is only one, single Being. There are no distinctions in Being. By not-Being Parmenides means empty space or that which is not material. So that Parmenides’ assumption of Being as the cosmic substance means this: all that exists, including thought, fills space; and all that does not exist does not fill space.

Being, the cosmic substance, is one, eternal, imperishable, homogeneous, unchangeable, and material. When men see the world as it really is, when they see its cosmic substance, they see it to be one continuous material block. The world is not made up of parts with intervals of nothing between them, but it is a solid, homogeneous whole. The cosmic Being is a timeless, spaceless Being with no distinctions. The form of Being is spherical. It is cosmic-body and cosmic-thought. This is the assumption of Parmenides, which is so self-evident and so cogent to him that he does not attempt to prove but only to explain it.

(2) Other Things than the Cosmic Substance (Being) have no Real Existence. If Being is space that is filled, not-Being is empty space. However, empty space has no existence. But the existence of a plural number of things depends upon the existence of empty spaces between them. Furthermore, the motion of things and the change of things depend upon the existence of empty spaces in which they can move and change. Since empty space is not-Being and has no existence, the plurality of things and the motion and change of things have also no existence. They are illusions. The nature-world, with its richness of qualities and varietyof motions, before the logic of Parmenides “folds up its tents like the Arabs and silently steals away.”

This logical drawing out of one of the aspects of the Milesian conception of the cosmic matter has a curious result. The Milesians and Xenophanes sought to explain by the cosmic substance the many nature changes. But when in the hands of Parmenides the cosmic substance is all of reality, then there is no reality to the changes. Consequently the concept formed for the explanation of change has so developed as to deny the existence of change. The cosmic substance excludes all origination and decay, all space and time differences, all divisibility, diversity, and movement. There is only one real, all else is illusion.

But what can we say of the varied world of nature as it appears to us? Do we see, hear, and touch many things and motions? In Part II of his poem he raises the question, Suppose man takes the world of change as real how must he explain it? He answers by using the explanation of Heracleitus. But these changes of eye and ear belong to the world of sense, and Parmenides is talking, in Part I of his poem, about the real world or that world known to thought. Parmenides insists as strongly as did Heracleitus that the reason and not the sense shall be our guide to what is real. Yet he arrives at exactly the opposite conclusion from Heracleitus as to what the reason sees as real. The senses show us only the many and the changing. The reason shows us nothing of the sort, but only permanence and unchangingness.

b. Zeno (b. 490–430 B. C.).

Zeno was born in Elea. He was contemporary with those who tried to reconcile the two sides of the metaphysicalcontroversy,—Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists. He wrote in prose in the form of question and answer. This is the beginning of the dialogue literature, which in the time of the Sophists, Socrates and Plato, was richly developed and became known as dialectic. On the Greek stage during the time of Pericles it came forth in dramatic form through Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.