Parmenides’ attack on cosmology and natural philosophy did not put an end to the project. If anything, his attack was followed by a more vibrant burst of theorizing and explaining natural phenomena. But there is a notable lack of refutations of Parmenides’ demolition of natural philosophy. According to leading scholars, the Pluralists do not really engage with Parmenides’ offensive, but merely assume without argument that there is a plurality of basic substances that can congregate to produce the objects of our experience, or separate to bring objects to an end.[1] Accordingly, they continue the project of natural philosophy without defending themselves against the devastating thesis, asserted by Parmenides and his Eleatic followers, that there is no philosophical justification for believing in a world of objects and people.
Against this widely-held assessment, I would like to offer an alternative, which I shall present hypothetically at first. Suppose that the first generation of (non-Eleatic) philosophers after Parmenides read his poem differently than we do today. Suppose that they saw the second division of the poem, the cosmology, not as an anti-cosmology proposed only to be diagnosed and rejected, but as a positive account of the world meant to rival and indeed surpass the accounts of the early Ionians. In that case, of course, there was no dialectical imperative to refute the theory presented in the first division of the poem, for it led not to a refutation of the goddess’s cosmology, and, by inference, to the refutation of all possible cosmologies; rather it offered a sample cosmology that could stand as a model for all future cosmologies.
In short, it offered a paradigm.
If the story I have told thus far is true, there is reason to think that goddess’s cosmology was already radically different from those that had hitherto been proposed. If, that is, the early Ionians had all held that their original stuff, or stuffs,[2] morphed into other stuffs in the way articulated by Heraclitus, who held that the birth of one stuff resulted from the death of another stuff, then the whole cosmos could be seen as a chaotic process. (Heraclitus had argued that it was an orderly processed governed by law; but his critics did not see it that way.) If, on the other hand, the world started from a plurality (or duality) of at least two everlasting substances, then there was a kind of primeval continuity that could provide a foundation for orderly change and evolution.
What we get from the first generation of Pluralists or neo-Ionians is a constructive account of how one can build objects, and ultimately a cosmos, from some basic everlasting building-blocks.
1.5.2.1 Empedocles’ Chemistry
Although I believe that Anaxagoras was the first to put down his theory in writing—Anaxagoras and Empedocles were contemporaries, with Anaxagoras being a few years older and, I think, the first to publish—Empedocles’ theory was simpler and clearer, at least in its basic theory. Empedocles posited the existence of four basic stuffs, which were everlasting: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. These were arguably the most abundant stuffs in the cosmos: planet Earth was composed of Earth; the seas that cover most of the Earth were composed of Water; the atmosphere was composed of Air; and the heavenly bodies were at least partly made of fiery stuff. All other materials in the cosmos were, according to Empedocles, composed of these four stuffs. They were, in short, chemical elements in his theory. There was as yet no everyday word for ‘element’ in Greek. Empedocles called them rhizōmata ‘roots’ (plural of rhizōma).
Empedocles gave a couple of chemical analyses that show he viewed other stuffs as compounds of the four elements. Like Parmenides, he composed his work in verse, saying:
Earth met with these in most equal measures,
with Hephaestus [Fire], rain [Water], and blazing aether [Air],
dropping anchor in the perfect harbors of Cypris [goddess of Love],
either a little greater or less among more parts,
and from them came blood and other kinds of flesh. (fr. 98)
From this statement we glean that blood consisted of equal portions of the four elements, or (to mimic modern chemical notation) E1W1A1F1. Other bodily fluids and tissues contained slightly different ratios.
As for bone,
Pleasant Earth in well-wrought crucibles
got two parts of glimmering Nestis [Water], out of its eight parts,
and four from Hephaestus; and white bones were produced,
joined by the marvelous glue of Harmony. (fr. 96)
That is: the formula of bone was bone = E2W2F4. Empedocles did not provide any empirical evidence for his chemical formulas, and it is doubtful he had anything more than speculation to back them up. But he did, at least, offer a scheme by which his four elements combined in whole-number ratios, as in modern chemistry, to form compounds. These compounds were held together by the force of Love (“Cypris,” “Harmony”), which was one of two fundamental forces, Love or attraction, and Strife or repulsion.
Whatever we may think of Empedocles’ choice of elements, it exercised a powerful influence on later natural philosophy, becoming the most widely-held table of elements throughout antiquity, the Middle Ages, and into the early modern period. There were, to be sure, many variations on this basic scheme, including the addition of Aristotle’s fifth element and the view that the basic stuffs could be transformed into one another (Plato, Aristotle).
Empedocles nowhere argued against an Eleatic monism. He did, however, echo Parmenides’ insistence of changeless essence:
I shall tell you another thing: there is no birth of any of all
mortal things, neither end of destructive death,
but only mixture and separation of mixed things
exist, and ‘birth’ is a term applied to them by men. (fr. 8)
Fools! Their reflections are not far-reaching,
who expect what was not before to come-to-be,
or that something will die out and perish utterly. (fr. 9)
For from what in no way is, it is impossible to come-to-be,
and for what-is to perish cannot be fulfilled or known,
for it will always be there wherever one puts it at any time. (fr. 12)
There was no coming-to-be or perishing of what really is. Of course, this did not preclude the appearance and disappearance of compounds, which consisted of temporary arrangements of elements. But the elements themselves were everlasting.
1.5.2.2. Anaxagoras’ Chemistry
Anaxagoras offered an alternative account of how things are. His story about the rise of the cosmos began with a primeval chaos:
Together were all things, boundless both in quantity and in smallness; for the small was boundless too. And as all things were together nothing was manifest by reason of smallness. For air and aether dominated all things, both being boundless. For these things are the greatest in the totality both in quantity and in size. (fr. 1)
He went on to expand on this account:
Before these things were separated, when they were all together, not so much as a color was manifest. For the mixture of all objects prevented it, of the wet and the dry, of the hot and the cold, and of the bright and dark, and much earth was in it and seeds countless in number which were not at all like one another. Indeed, none of he other things appeared like any other. Since these things were so, one must believe that all objects were present in the totality. (fr. 4b)
Anaxagoras’ original cosmic soup consisted of some of every kind of thing. How this is to be understood is controversial: he mentioned stuffs such as earth (and in fr. 1 air and aether), which seem to have made up a major portion of what there is. But he also mentioned basic contraries: wet and dry, hot and cold, bright and dark. And he spoke of seeds. Were the stuffs composed of basic contraries (as later Aristotle would construct his four elements about of combinations of hot-cold and wet-dry)? Were the “seeds” small packets of stuffs? Or were they biological seeds? Or were they structural principles? The remaining fragments do not make any of this clear.
What Anaxagoras did do was to describe a cosmic process in which a cosmic Mind started a circular motion that grew into a cosmic vortex, which sorted things out into layers of heavier and lighter matter (fr. 9, fr. 12). From this vortex motion emerged the Earth, the heavenly bodies, and the daily rotation of the heavens. But even with this sorting process, “nothing is completely separated nor segregated the one from the other except mind” (fr. 12). “In everything there is a portion of everything except mind,” he was quick to point out (fr. 11). Anaxagoras conceived of the world as a grand mixture of all the stuffs (and contraries and seeds) there were. The cosmic whirl tended to separate substances from each other in the manner of a centrifuge. “When mind began to cause motion, as a result of everything being in motion there was a separation, and as far as mind caused motion, everything was segregated” (fr. 13). But even with the separation, there was still a complete mixture of everything with everything—except for mind, which retained a unique status.
Rather than conceiving of nature as consisting of a small set of elements that interacted to form a potentially infinite set of compounds, in the manner of Empedocles, Anaxagoras envisaged nature as a mixture of an indefinitely large number of kinds of entities. Physical processes could concentrate certain stuffs in certain areas, so that we could distinguish, for instance, between earth, water, air, and fire; but even these stretches of, for instance, water, contained other entities, and indeed, at least small quantities of every other kind of entity there was. “And since there are portions equal in number of the large and the small, so too would everything be in everything. And it is not possible for things to be isolated, but everything has a portion of everything. … But as it was in the beginning, so at present all things are still together” (fr. 6).
In Anaxagoras’ theory there was some of everything in every place. But whatever predominated in quantity (the largest ingredient), determined the sensible qualities of a given object. So if a we encounter a sea, we will perceive it as water, although it may have detectable amounts of other entities (e.g. salt), and surely it will have undetectable amounts of every other entity.
What is the upshot of all this?
Coming-to-be and perishing the Greeks do not treat properly. For no object comes-to-be or perishes, but each is mixed together from and segregated into existing objects. And thus they should really call coming-to-be ‘mixture’ and perishing ‘segregation.’ (fr. 17)
In this assessment, Anaxagoras sounds just like Empedocles. And both Anaxagoras and Empedocles were clearly echoing the words and thoughts of Parmenides. Not only the Parmenides of the first half of his poem, but the Parmenides of the second half, which presents coming-to-be as mixture and perishing as separation.
[1] Pepple 1996: 169-70 maintains that the neo-Ionians presented a now-lost argument against the Eleatics.
[2] Arguably, Anaximander was a pluralist even if the other Milesians were not; also, Xenophanes may have been a dualist (advocating earth and water), though the evidence is not clear in his case.