1.4.2.1 Parmenides the Cosmologist
The second half of Parmenides’ poem is a cosmology—an account of the structure and nature of the cosmos. It does what most of Parmenides’ predecessors had done, providing a theory of the origins of the world, a quasi-scientific account of the workings of nature. Unfortunately, we do not have extensive quotations from the second half of the poem, as we do of the first half. But by all accounts, the second “half” of the poem was considerably longer than the first half, and elaborately worked out. So, whatever Parmenides’ intentions were in composing the cosmology, it was not a superficial or perfunctory account that he prepared. As he says at the outset,
I declare to you this arrangement (diakosmos) to be completely likely,
so that no judgment of mortals will ever surpass you. (fr. 8. 60-61)
Parmenides’ cosmology is meant to be highly plausible and superior to those of earlier thinkers.
Parmenides derives his cosmos from the conjunction of two kinds of stuff, as previously mentioned: Light and Night, as follows:
… They [mortals] made up their minds to name two forms [morphai],
of which it is not right to name one—this is where they have gone astray—
and they distinguished contraries in body and set signs
apart from each other: to this form the ethereal Fire of flame,
being gentle, very light, everywhere he same as itself,
not the same as the other; but also that one by itself
contrarily unintelligent Night, a dense body and heavy. (fr. 8. 53-59)
Here Parmenides sets out two fundamental building blocks of the universe, Light and Night, each having contrary properties of the other. Light is bright, light (in weight), rare (and intelligent? perhaps hot?); Night is dark, heavy, dense, and unintelligent (perhaps cold?).
Everything in the world is comprised of a mixture of Light and Night:
But since all things are called Light and Night
and the names according to their powers are applied to these things and those,
all is full at once of Light and dark Night,
both equal, since nothing belongs to neither. (fr. 9)
Parmenides offers us a dualism of two forms, each embodying properties contrary to the other. But when the two are mixed together, they can produce the multifarious substances we meet in the world with a wide variation of properties. Parmenides’ Light and Night are, in a word, elements. Each one has a set of fixed properties which constitutes its essence. Combined with each other, the forms can produce all the properties in different degrees. The two forms, then, are permanent components of the world; their mixtures are temporary arrangements of the components.
Thus Parmenides’ cosmos consists of a plurality of beings including a plurality of substances, all based on the existence of two types of reality, two “forms,” Fire and Night. So he offers us a dualistic ontology producing a pluralistic cosmology.
There seems, however, to be a fatal flaw in this cosmology. For “it is not right to name one” of the elements, which is where mortals “have gone astray” (fr. 8. 54). Later, we will have to consider what the status of his cosmology is, given his caveat.
1.4.2.2 Parmenides’ Discovery of Elements
Whatever we think of Parmenides’ cosmology, we need to take stock of what he has accomplished. He has, arguably, produced the very first theory of elements. While Aristotle talks about his earliest predecessors positing the existence of principles and elements, the fact is that until Parmenides identified essences, there was no machinery to distinguish an element from a non-element.
In the early Ionian philosophers, we seem to have met with stuffs that turned into other stuffs, such as Anaximenes’ Air becoming Wind, Cloud, Water, and so on. Heraclitus made it explicit: the death of one stuff is the birth of another in this series. On his interpretation, there were no permanent stuffs that kept their identity through changes.
But in Parmenides’ cosmos, there are two stuffs that are everlasting and changeless, at least in their basic properties: their essences. Fire is always bright, light, rare, hot (?), intelligent(?); Night is always dark, heavy, dense, cold (?), unintelligent (fr. 8. 56-59). Each one is, evidently, everlasting and unchangeable in its essence. But they can combine with each other to produce a wide variety of derivative stuffs. The combination of the two constitutes a compound. Different ratios of the two components will, apparently, produce different compounds. Accordingly, we “mortals” can in principle account for all the different stuffs of the world by reducing them to their ultimate components.
Now, it so happens that, from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth, scientists successfully explained (most of) the various substances of the world as consisting of either elements or compounds of elements. The result of their researches is the modern Periodic Table of Elements. In fact there are ninety-odd stable elements and an indeterminately large number of compounds of them. Thanks to modern quantum theory, cosmology, and astrophysics, we can say that the stable elements (except for hydrogen and some helium) were forged in the center of stars, and, once created, remain unchanged unless they are involved in some nuclear event. In that sense, Parmenides’ general theory of elements has been vindicated by modern science, even if his specific table of elements has been rendered obsolete. To be sure, Parmenides did not identify the elements of which our world is made. But he did provide the conceptual machinery needed to distinguish one element from another (through its unique essence) and an element from a compound (through its prior existence and contribution to the compound). The Greek word for ‘element,’ stoicheion, was coined and adapted to “chemistry” in the later fifth century BCE, after Parmenides, but it was Parmenides’ notion of morphē that made the concept and its technical name possible.[1]
[1] Diels 1899; Schwabe 1980.