1.5.1 How is change possible?
Parmenides had seemingly dealt a fatal blow to cosmology and the proto-scientific project that had characterized the earliest phase of philosophy. But if there was nothing but Being, and Being could not be differentiated and could not change in any way, Parmenides had said everything that could be said about What-Is in a few lines of his grandiose poem. Natural philosophy and science were dead, and there was no obvious way to revive them.
According to the wisdom of the twentieth century, Parmenides was the great turning-point of early Greek philosophy, the thinker who drove a stake into the heart of cosmology. On this view, the first phase of Western philosophy consisted of an attempt to account for the world in terms of Material Monism, describing the modifications of a single original substance, such as water for Thales or air for Anaximenes. Parmenides reacted by insisting on the uniformity of what-is and its imperviousness to change. A Static Monism replaced a dynamic Material Monism, rendering an evolutionary story of the cosmos impossible. What-Is just is. It has no past and no future, just an eternal present. Any differences or changes we seem to perceive are illusory.
The generations of thinkers after Parmenides are known as the Pluralists. They attempt to revive cosmology by positing a plurality of permanent substances. These substances are, in later terminology, elements, which can interact with each other to produce still other substances. Perhaps the simplest and best-known example is that of Empedocles, who identified Earth, Water, Air, and Fire as the four elements. These can combine in different ratios to produce different compounds. The compounds in turn can come to be and perish. But the elements themselves are everlasting features of the world. The elements retain the permanence of Parmenides’ Being, but they are plural in number, and can, by their changing associations, account for the observed phenomena of the world. So we get a kind of elegant compromise between constancy and change.
According to the twentieth century consensus, the successors of Parmenides, namely, the Pluralists, desperately tried to revive the moribund corpus of the first phase of philosophy, but in vain. For they did not refute Parmenides’ criticisms. They did offer alternative starting points for philosophy, but they never refuted—indeed, never really confronted—the claim that you cannot explain or know or account for what-is-not.
As Jonathan Barnes said, some Pluralists “point to the flaws in Parmenides’ argument: flaws there certainly are; but no Presocratic put his finger on them. … The neo-Ionians [his term for the Pluralists] … manfully attempted to tread again the scientific road …. And of course [they] are … right[:] … things do move, they do alter, they are generated. For all that, the neo-Ionian revival is a flop: it does not answer Elea.”[1]
Similarly, Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, writing at about the same time, observe, “Parmenides’ metaphysics dominated fifth-century Ionian philosophy … Individual, ingenious and often creative as the leading Ionian thinkers were, each of them is appropriately seen as responding to his radical critique of common-sense belief in the world about us.”[2] After a survey of post-Parmenidean thought ending with early atomism, they conclude, “Atomism is in many ways the crown of philosophical achievement before Plato. It fulfilled the ultimate aim of material monism by cutting the Gordian knot of the Eleatic elenchus.”[3] Here, the atomists are seen to succeed—not, however, by answering the Eleatics, but by dismissing them (“cutting the Gordian knot”). In this way, Kirk, Raven, and Schofield side with Barnes.
According to the standard account, then, to the extent that the Pluralists finessed the real problem, their project was doomed from the outset. True, they proposed ever more innovative accounts of how the world worked and how the cosmos came to be. But they left unrefuted the argument that undermined the scientific program, the inscrutability of not-being.
Leading scholars of the twentieth century offered a powerful, carefully constructed, and compelling account of how early Western philosophy and science developed, was attacked, and responded. The account recognized a profound debate arising in the early fifth century BCE, and influencing the content and methodology of early Greek thought. The reconstruction of the history of philosophy built on Aristotle (with his attribution to the early Ionians of Material Monism) but went beyond him to see a hidden dialectic between the “Ionians” (the natural philosophers) and the “Eleatics” (Parmenides and his followers, the anti-scientific metaphysicians). Barnes divides his account of Presocratic development into sections entitled “Eden,” “The Serpent,” “Paradise Lost,” and “Paradise Regained.” Except that, according to him, Paradise is not really regained, at least not in the fifth century. The fifth-century project is, alas, a “flop.”
The story he and his colleagues tell is a powerful and influential one. But it is false.[4]
[1] Barnes 1982: 442.
[2] 1983: 351.
[3] Kirk, Raven, Schofield 1983: 433.
[4] See D. W. Graham, Explaining the Cosmos 2006, ch. 1.