Scribes: Laura
Giordano and Jennie
Lin
These
minutes were not spoken; for another version,
As we began our lecture on
Parmenides of Elea, Professor Hutchinson indicated that there are two unique
elements in the study of Parmenides’ thought. The first is that because substantial fragments have been
found of texts written by Parmenides’ own hand, we are able, for the
first time, to be sure that he is a serious scholar who had taken into account
within his theory, everything that was occurring in his universe, both
philosophically and intellectually.
According to Professor Hutchinson, the “over-serious” tone
of Parmenides’ poem is evidence of the rigid Greek metre that is also
found in Homeric poetry, and this allows us to detect that the texts are
authentic quotations of Parmenides instead of a loose paraphrase, which is
often a combination of “light” and “heavy” verse. The professor attributes this accurate
preservation of Parmenides’ work to the “scrupulous”
Simplicius, a scholar who came a thousand years after Parmenides. The second unique element found in
Parmenides writing is his “marriage” or synthesis of Pythagorean
and Milesian theories and traditions. He was the first philosopher to do so. Like many syntheses, the whole is
greater than the sum of its parts, and Parmenides not only combined these two
streams of thought, he also added to them and took them to a newer, deeper and
more profound level. Thus,
according to Professor Hutchinson, the writings of Parmenides are not only
synthetic and creative, but they are also progressive. The professor notes that this synthesis
of different philosophical systems is interesting as Parmenides lived in
western Greece, and there were no indications that he’d visited Ionia
(older Greece), where Milesian theories were likely to be found. The conclusion that could be drawn is
that there must have been travelers (like Xenophanes) who carried information
about the Milesian system of thought to Elea.
Professor
Hutchinson then went on to explain that Parmenides’ poem was divided into
two main parts: the preface or introduction, and his cosmology. Furthermore, his cosmology is divided
into two parts; the first part is called the ‘Way of Truth’ and the
second the ‘Way of Appearance’ or the ‘Way of Opinion’
as Professor Hutchinson refers to it.
Professor Hutchinson opened his discussion of Parmenides’ poem
with the preface, stating that it was a depiction of an unknown person on a
“weird trip:”
My
carriage was drawn by the mares which carry me to the limits
Of
my heart’s desire; they took me and set me on the renowned way
Of
the deity, which takes a man of knowledge unharmed through all.
……………….
Thanks
to the haste with which the maiden daughters of the Sun
Drove
the carriage, having left the abode of night and entered the light.
……………….
The
gates are of aither and they fill the huge frame of the gate,
And
vengeful Justice controls the alternating locks.
(pp.56-57,
F1 ll1-14)
At the end of this trip, we are introduced to a goddess who
welcomes this unknown traveler.
Young man,
You have reached my abode as the companion of immortal
harioteers
And of the mares which carry you. You are welcome.
It was no ill fate that prompted you to travel this way,
Which is indeed far from mortal men, beyond their beaten
paths;
No, it was Right and Justice. You must learn everything-
Both the steady heart of well-rounded truth,
And the beliefs of mortals, in which there is no true trust.
(p. 57, F1 ll23 - 30)
The rest of the Parmenides’ poem is of the goddess
speaking to the young man and revealing to him the esoteric truths about
reality. The structure of the poem suggests that Parmenides has drawn from
older stories of the Gods. For
example, according to the professor, the images that Parmenides conjures of
“the gates of the paths of night and day” (p. 57, F1 ln11) are the
manifestation of Justice at the gates of alternation of light and day. Furthermore, although the concepts of
light and dark are simple ideas in the preface, they are central themes in
Parmenides’ cosmology in the latter part of the poem.
Next, Professor Hutchinson moved on
to discuss the second half of the poem where Parmenides discloses his
cosmology. Although the fragments
for the second part of the poem are minimal in number compared to those of the preface,
we can still establish that is was in fact an attempt by Parmenides to create a
cosmological theory. The first
part of the cosmology (the ‘Way of Truth’) describes the way that
it is. In this, the way that it is is the way where there is real knowledge
to be had; it also presupposes that there is no possibility for knowledge of what
is not. The second part of the cosmology (the
‘Way of Opinion’) describes the way that it is not, the way of not being and the
untrue. Once Professor Hutchinson completed his outline of both the way that
it is and the way that
it is not, he
stated that it is important to note the tension between the first and the
second part of Parmenides’ cosmology. This tension occurs because part one of his cosmology seems
to undermine his second part.
Professor Hutchinson refers to this tension as the “classic
puzzle” scholars of Parmenides must address, and states that there are
three main “camps” of opinions that attempt to resolve this
problem.
The first of the three camps tells
us to view Parmenides’ cosmology as an extended joke. This means that we should view the
first part of his cosmology as the way to truth and reality, and view the
“Way of Appearance” with its “strange” notions of light
and dark as a joke or “weird stuff” that we should guard ourselves
against in our search for real knowledge about the world. Professor Hutchinson then quoted a
passage to illustrate where the support for this resolution of the tension is
found in the words of the goddess in Parmenides’ poem.
You
must learn everything-
Both the steady heart of well-rounded truth,
And the beliefs of mortals, in which there is no true trust.
(p.60, F1 ll28-30)
The second “camp” of opinions is one which
states that the second part of the cosmology is an account of how the world
came to be as Parmenides was aware of it.
However, as an account, it is radically a failure in that it contradicts
the constraints of the first part of Parmenides’ cosmology, which states
that things that are not can’t be featured in any true theory of the world. The third “camp” is the one
favoured by Professor Hutchinson since it considers the poem as a Milesian
cosmology where the two principles are light and dark – principles which
are also evident in theories of Xenophanes as well as the Milesians, from whom
Parmenides must have drawn these views. According to this third camp, we should
view the poem as a basic cosmology, but with a methological preface; the
function of this methological preface is not to undermine the adequacy of the
account in the second part of the cosmology, but to point out that the account
is but a mere opinion or hypothesis and thus cannot be called true
knowledge. To further emphasize
his fondness of this camp, and to justify this third interpretation of the
“classic puzzle,” Professor Hutchinson makes a reference to Timeaus, which is a cosmology of how the
world came to be according to Plato.
The professor tells us that Plato also preceded his cosmology with a
methological preface, one that is Parmenidian in nature. This illustrates that no matter how
strongly Plato believed his theories, he realized that any cosmology always
falls short of true knowledge.
Professor
Hutchinson now posed the question: “What kind of cosmology does this
amount to?” To answer his
own question, the professor refers to Plutarch’s testimony T2 on page
sixty-one:
Actually, Parmenides has not done away with fire and water
and crags and settlements of Europe and Asia, as Colotes says, because he has
composed a cosmology as well, and he produces the whole phenomenal world out of
and as a result of the combination of his elements, the bright and the
dark. He has a great deal to say
about the earth, the heavens, the sun, moon, and heavenly bodies; he has an
account of the creation of the human race; and in the true fashio of a
scientist of old who is developing his own theory, rather than criticizing
someone else’s he covers every issue of importance.
After having read this testimonial, Professor Hutchinson
asserts that he wholly agrees with this interpretation of Parmenides’
theory, because he believes that Parmenides is simply criticizing his own
theory instead of someone else’s; the poet has simply taken the standard
table of contents from the Milesians, and then describes his own position on
the theory.
Professor Hutchinson then quoted
other fragments in favour of this opinion:
How
the earth and sun and moon,
How
the aither, shared by all, the Milky Way, the outermost heaven,
And
the hot force of the stars, all strove to come into existence.
(p.63,
F10)
This fragment shows the similarity between Parmenides’
cosmology and the Milesian cosmology.
Then there’s F13:
The
narrower ones became filled with unadulterated fire,
And
subsequent ones with night, and a portion of flame permeates them;
Between
these is the goddess who controls all things,
Since
for all things she initiated vile intercourse and childbirth,
Sending
female to join with male and again conversely
Male
with female.
(p.
63, F13)
This fragment shows that “somewhere up there”
between night and fire, there exists the goddess who controls all things. Professor Hutchinson posits this to be
the Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and sexual love. The presence of this goddess who is the first of the divine
forces of the world is derived from Milesian, and even Phythagorean
traditions. The professor further
notes T8, which is Parmenides’ theory of astrology, and T9, which
attributes the identification of the morning and evenings stars as one and the
same (Venus) to Parmenides.
Professor Hutchinson also mentioned
T10, T11, and T17, which all have to do with describing the human condition,
but which are all based on opinion, and are not what could be considered to be
knowledge.
Professor Hutchinson praises Parmenides’ work as
elegant, since not only does it provide us with a reason why a cosmology is
never knowledge, but also why we believe that it is knowledge:
…On the whole, Parmenides did not go into this [the
operation of each of the five sense] with any clarity, but only said that there
were two elements and that knowledge is due to one of them being in excess of
the other. For our thinking, he
says, become different depending on whether the hot or the cold is
predominant…However, even this kind of thinking needs a certain adaptation,
as he says:
‘For thinking comes to men
according to the condition which the blend
Of the much-straying body is in at
any moment. For it is the same
thing
That the constitution of the human
body thinks,
In each and every man. For the full is what is thought.’
(p.65,
F18)
We should also consider Parmenides
as a “hero of the mind” – an inspirational thinker and
philosopher because he was truly committed to the process of logical
argumentation. His theory challenges
us to criticize his conclusions about the world, and Professor Hutchinson reads
us an excerpt from a fellow student’s position paper, in which the
student admires the strength of Parmenides’ argument, but proposes that
Parmenides did not provide enough justification for the premise that there is
no such thing as nothing. The
professor agrees that it is not obvious that there is no such thing as nothing;
in fact, there are those such as Epicurus who think that the world is largely
full of nothing, and also those, like Aristotle, who think that there is no
such thing as a void.
However, Professor Hutchinson
doesn’t take this premise about the existence of nothing to be the
starting point of Parmenides’ theory. In fact, the professor thinks that the starting point is the
self-reflective question: “What is knowledge?” Knowledge is something which has a
condition that must first be met before being considered to be real knowledge;
there must an object of thought which exists, and that has a relationship to
the thinker himself. This, Professor
Hutchinson says, is the fundamental insight to Parmenides. If the object of thought does not
exist, there is no relationship to the thinker, and therefore it follows that
you cannot have knowledge of it.
In other words, there can be no real knowledge of the non-existent. The professor tells us that Plato also
had this insight to Parmenides, and Plato believed that what can truly be
grounds for knowledge that is true has to be a thing that is permanent in
existence. In spite of all this
support, Professor Hutchinson says that although he does not expect us to be
conviced by this condition for knowledge, he believes it to be a reasonable
representation of Parmenides’ texts, and concludes by saying that
Parmenides is the “first true genius of ancient Greek philosophy,”
inspiring Zeno, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and other acient Greek philosophers.