Parmenides’ Response
Just when it seemed to be safe to consider Becoming as supplying the origin of Being, there arose a serious challenge to Becoming. The author was Parmenides of Elea, a Greek city-state in southern Italy, and the first important philosopher to come from a western Greek city. Almost all of the previous thinkers (all but Xenophanes, who was a wandering minstrel), wrote prose treatises. Parmenides offered a poem in epic meter, in which a young man (presumably Parmenides’ avatar) is led by chariot to the House of Night (familiar from Hesiod’s Theogony 736-757), where he is welcomed by an unnamed goddess, who reveals to him the secrets of philosophy (fr. 1).
She offers, for the first time we know of, an extended argument for the truths she reveals. So, with the double authority of a mythological goddess and of rational argument, Parmenides offers a critique of earlier thinkers.
The goddess argues as follows:
Come now, and I shall tell, and do you receive through hearing the tale,
which are the only ways of inquiry for thinking;
the one: that it is and that it is not possible not-to-be,
is the path of Persuasion (for she attends on Truth);
the other, that it is-not and that it is right it should not-be,
This I declare to you to be an utterly inscrutable track,
for neither could you know what-is-not (for it cannot be accomplished)
nor could you declare it. (fr. 2)
It is right to say and to think that what-is is, for being is
and nothing is not. These things I bid you consider.
From this first way of inquiry <I withhold> you … (fr. 6, in part)
Never shall this prevail, that things that are-not are.
But you, withhold your thought from this way of inquiry,
nor let habit born of long experience force you along this way,
to wield an unseeing eye and echoing ear
and tongue. But judge by reasoning (logos) the very contentious examination
uttered by me. (fr. 7)
… Only one tale is left of the way:
that it is; and on this are posted
very many signs … (fr. 8, in part)
The goddess draws a strict line between the Path of Persuasion, which consists of examining what-is, and the inscrutable track that consists of pursuing what-is-not. The former path leads to knowledge, the latter goes nowhere. She also warns against conflating what-is and what-is-not, like mortals often do; this seems to envisage a third path of inquiry, but it too is a dead end (fr. 6). Indeed, the goddess points out that this path is palintropos “backward-turning,” using a rare word that was used by Heraclitus (fr. 51),[1] in what appears to be a series of echoes of Heraclitean statements.
To be or not to be, that is the question. Parmenides’ goddess completely dismisses the second option, allowing only what-is to be a topic of discussion, analysis, and understanding. What-is-not is inscrutable, inaccessible, unknowable. Furthermore, to think that to-be and not-to-be are the same and not the same is crazy (Parmenides fr. 6.8-9). If you remember, Heraclitus said that the birth of one stuff was the death of another (Heraclitus fr. 36). Parmenides’ goddess rules this out a priori. There is only what-is; what-is-not is not and cannot ever be.
But who is challenging whom here: is Heraclitus rejecting Parmenides or vice versa, or are they both unaware or uninterested in each other? Briefly, Heraclitus is famous for attacking his opponents by name, as in fr. 40: “Learning many things does not teach understanding. Else it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, as well as Xenophanes and Hecataeus.” Later sources love to repeat passages in which Heraclitus bad-mouths his predecessors and contemporaries. Heraclitus almost certainly would have challenged Parmenides if his work had been extant. Parmenides, on the other hand, used epic conventions, which do not allow contemporary references, but do allow literary allusions. And that is what Parmenides offers, including at times imitating Heraclitus’ style and vocabulary.[2]
Now what exactly Parmenides’ understanding of not-being is, remains controversial. But he seems to want to rule out not-being, at least in part insofar as what-is-not is nothing at all. Yet, as later thinkers, notably including Plato and Aristotle, would point out, to say something is-not is not necessarily to say it is nothing. And indeed, we cannot even communicate without using negations—which Parmenides’ poem itself is full of.
In any case, Parmenides argues specifically that coming-to-be is impossible, for it involves a transition from what-is-not to what-is.
Where, whence did it [what-is] grow? Not from what-is-not will I allow
you to say or to think; for it is not sayable or thinkable
that it is-not. (fr. 8.7-8)
Coming-to-be seems to presuppose coming from what is-not, which has been ruled out already.
If Parmenides is right, then there is no becoming, only being, which turns out to be changeless and timeless:
And how would what-is be hereafter? How would it have come-to-be?
For if it has come-to-be it is-not, and similarly if it is ever about to be.
Thus coming-to-be is quenched and perishing unheard of. (fr. 8.19-21)
His conclusion, that coming-to-be apesbestai “is quenched” reminds us of the fire of the cosmos aposbennumenon “being quenched” by measures in Heraclitus fr. 30. (The fire imagery is not suggested by anything in Parmenides’ own argument.) The fire of your argument is quenched, Heraclitus!
Now, in fact, Heraclitus is not claiming that what-is comes out of what-is-not, especially in the sense of construing what-is-not as nothing at all. But it may well look like Heraclitus is committed to believing in an impossible transformation. It will take some serious analysis to distinguish between ways not-being can be and to rehabilitate coming-to-be after the powerful logic of Parmenides’ goddess.
It appears that after Parmenides’ attack on coming-to-be, what is left is only what-is, or, in other words, being. And, given the further restrictions on not-being, there should be only one thing in the universe, what-is or being. All differentiation is ruled out. We seem to be left with a very austere monism
[1] The reading palintropos is correct vs. the alternative reading palintonos. See Vlastos 1955: 348-51.
[2] See Graham 2002.