1.4.1 Essentialism
1.4.1.1 Parmenides the Monist
According to later tradition, Parmenides’ great contribution to the debate about being is his claim that there is only one thing in the cosmos: What-Is or Being. Parmenides is a strict Monist who recognizes only one reality.
According to Aristotle, however, who is the first thinker to provide something like a history of the beginnings of philosophy, Parmenides was not the first monist. Thales, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus said there was just one thing. In the case of Thales, it was Water. In the case of Anaximenes, it was Air. In the case of Heraclitus, it was Fire.[1]
The big difference between Parmenides’ predecessors and himself was that his predecessors identified some special type of stuff as the ultimate reality. This stuff could appear as other things: for instance, Thales’ Water could appear as air or fire or earth, but it would still be Water. For Parmenides, by contrast, there was only What-Is or Being, something very abstract and all-encompassing. Parmenides’ Being, however, cannot change. In his world, there is no change—no motion in space, no change of quality or quantity, no coming-to-be at all.
This creates a big problem. In our world, there is constant change of all kinds—as Heraclitus was quick to point out. But if there is no change, then philosophy cannot account for the world we live in or give us any direction about how to live and flourish. Indeed, nothing that we are familiar with—plants, animals, mountains and valleys, sun, moon, and stars—even you and I— really exists. There is only Being.
How can a strict monist, like Parmenides is said to have been, offer us anything more than a very elegant theory of being, an ontology without a physics or epistemology or ethics? His Path of Persuasion seems to lead to a practical dead end. Being is; nothing is not. That is all there is, and that is all there is to say.
Aristotle, however, praises Parmenides for not stopping there.[2] He points out that the second half of Parmenides’ poem posits the existence of two entities: Light and Night, or, as Aristotle explains them, Fire and Earth. These two mix together to make all the multifarious objects and structure of the world. Clearly, Aristotle sees the second half of Parmenides’ poem as the natural sequel to the first, providing a dualistic ontology as a supplement to the monistic ontology of the first half of the poem, one that allows for a pluralistic world in which change and development can be accounted for.
Now many other commentators on Parmenides see the second half of the poem as offering, not a supplement to the monism of the first half, but an object lesson in how any pluralistic theory of what-is will fail: it allows what-is-not to enter into the picture. This is the view of Parmenides’ devoted follower Melissus. According to Melissus, Parmenides offers the second half of the poem only as a cautionary tale of how any attempt to provide a pluralistic cosmology will violate Parmenides’ principles. Here is how, according to Parmenides (on Melissus’ interpretation), to produce an attractive account of how the world works; but it violates the prohibition against not-being, so it fails. Parmenides’ alleged cosmology based on Light and Night, according to Melissus, is a reductio ad absurdum of conventional cosmologies, not a vindication. Melissus does go on to offer a kind of cosmology of his own, but it is a cosmology in which there an infinite expanse of only one thing, being, with no change and no development possible.
1.4.1.2 Parmenides the Essentialist
There is, however, one positive contribution that Parmenides makes which often is overlooked. In his journey along the Path of Persuasion, he identifies characteristics that What-Is or Being must have, no matter what. His fragment 8 begins as follows:
… Only one tale is left of the way:
that it is; and on this are posted
very many signs, that [1] what-is is [a] ungenerated and [b] imperishable,
[2] a whole of one kind, [3] unperturbed and [4] complete. (fr. 8.1-4)
So what-is has several characteristics: 1) it is without a) coming-to-be or b) perishing, 2) it is a whole with one nature, 3) it does not move or change, and 4) it is complete.
These features of what-is are defining characters, what are known as essences. They belong to what-is in every situation. True, if Parmenides is a strict monist, there is only one situation; but whether things are one or many, an essence makes a thing what it is. Later, Aristotle will give an account of man, or human being, as a rational animal. That is arguably the essence of Socrates, and, perhaps surprisingly, of every other human being that has existed or will exist. True, some individuals may be handicapped so as to lack the quality of rationality; but they at least have the capacity to be rational, as, for instance, a dog or cat does not.
It is not clear that anyone before Parmenides had the notion of a fixed essence. Aristotle will helpfully distinguish between essences and what he calls accidents, that is: incidental features of a thing. Socrates is essentially a rational animal. But he is incidentally pale or tan. So getting a suntan does not make Socrates go out of existence, though according to Aristotle, if a witch turned him into a pig (as happened to Odysseus’s sailors), he would cease to be a rational animal and hence, to be Socrates.
If you recall, Anaximenes said that, by changing in density, one stuff can become other stuffs; fire by becoming ever more dense turns into air, wind, cloud, water, earth, and stones. And by the reverse process of becoming ever more rare, stones can turn into all the other stuffs in the series. Heraclitus pointed out that in such a transition, the birth of the new stuff is the death of the old stuff. In other words, A becomes B by perishing. If, however, there are essences, it is at least possible that some A can become B by changing its incidental features, while retaining its essence. For instance, Socrates can become a philosopher without ceasing to be a human being. Or, to use Anaximander’s theory, if we start with Air, Water might be a certain modification of Air, schematically W = f1 (A); and Earth might be another modification of Air, E = f2 f1 (A).
The theory of essence, it seems, may offer a way out of the bog of not-being. If a subject like Socrates can gain a new property like being tan without going out of existence, then change might be possible without creating some fundamental contradiction. But once more we are confronted by the question of what Parmenides is up to in the second half of his poem. Is he revealing to us the absurdity of cosmology, as Melissus claims, or is he showing us how to save cosmology from absurdity, as Aristotle claims?
[1] Aristotle Metaphysics 1.3, 983b7-22, 984a5-8.
[2] Aristotle Metaphysics 1.5, 986b10-987a2.