Chapter 62 Nine Parmenides Ⅰ Cold Reason

Philosophy in the Age of Greek Tragedy Nine Parmenides Ⅰ Cold Reason 9.1 The abstraction of pure reason If every word of Heraclitus declares the pride and majesty of the truth, but it is the truth grasped by intuition, not the truth climbed by the lead of logic. Contemplating instead of peeping, comprehending rather than thinking, then, in his contemporary Parmenides (Parmenides), there is an opposite image standing shoulder to shoulder with him, who is also a type of prophet of truth, but As if made of ice instead of fire, a stinging cold light flashed around. Perhaps in his very advanced years, Parmenides had a moment in which he fell into the purest, untainted by any reality, utterly fleshless abstraction.In the tragic age of the two centuries of ancient Greece, there was no moment more un-Greek than this one.Its product is a doctrine of existence.This moment became a dividing stone in his own life, dividing it into two periods.However, this moment also divides Pre-Socratic thought into two halves, the first half can be called the Anaximander period, and the second half can be directly called the Parmenides period.The early philosophical activities of Parmenides himself still bear the appearance of Anaximander's period. He put forward a coherent system of philosophy and physics to answer Anaximander's questions.Later, when he, seized by that shudder of abstraction, formulated the simplest propositions about being and non-being, his own previous system became one of the old theories on the rubbish heap.However, he didn't seem to have completely lost his paternal concern for the strong Ning Xin'er in his youth, so he wanted to say: "Although there is only one correct road, if people want to take another road, In its quality and consistency, then, I am afraid that only my early views are correct." He defends himself with this attitude, and even in that great poem on nature he also gives his early physics The system has a rather lofty status and a rather generous space, and this poem is supposed to announce a new point of view as the only signpost to the truth.This kind of paternal concern, though it may be only an unconscious error, is the only thing left in a nature that has been completely rigidified by rigid logic and has become almost a thinking machine. human feeling.

9.2 Positive and negative abstractions of pure reason It seems to me that the personal intercourse between Parmenides and Anaximander is not implausible, but that his origin in Anaximander's teaching is not only plausible, but obvious. .Therefore, he does not believe in a strict division between a world of being and a world of becoming.Heraclitus likewise did not believe in this division, which led him to deny its existence at all.Both philosophers sought a way out of a dualistic world order in which they confronted each other or were incompatible.Anaximander eschews once and for all the field of becoming and the qualities it gives in experience by leaping towards the indeterminate, the indeterminable.It was not an easy leap for a mind as unique as Heraclitus or Parmenides.So they try to walk as best they can, and they reserve for themselves the right to jump only where their feet can no longer find support and they must jump to avoid falling.

The world that both philosophers intuit again and again is the one that Anaximander so sentimentally condemns and interprets as the site of crime and the purging place of the injustice of becoming.As we have already seen, in his intuition Heraclitus found what an astonishingly regular and reliable order all becoming displays.From this, he reasoned, becoming itself can never be sinful and unjust. Parmenides took a completely different view.They compare the various qualities, and believe they have discovered that all these qualities are not the same, but must be grouped into two classes.For example, he compared light and darkness, the latter quality being clearly just the opposite of the former.He thus distinguished positive qualities from negative ones, and devoted himself earnestly to the search for and documentation of this fundamental contradiction throughout nature.In doing so, his method is as follows: he cites pairs of contradictions, such as light and heavy, thin and thick, active and passive, and then understands them in terms of the contradictory patterns of light and darkness.Anything that is consistent with light is a positive attribute, and anything that is consistent with darkness is a negative attribute.If he puts out heavy and light, then the light will be on the side of light, and the heavy will be on the side of darkness.Heaviness is then seen only as the opposite of lightness, which is seen as a positive attribute.This approach already produces in itself an ability to resist and reject sensory cues, the ability to abstract logical programs.For the senses, weight seems quite convincingly presented as a positive quality, but this does not prevent Parmenides from listing it as a negative quality.Similarly, he regards earth as opposed to fire, cold as opposed to heat, thick as opposed to thin, yin as opposed to yang, and passive as opposed to activity, all of which are regarded as negative qualities. In his eyes, our experiential world is divided into two separate parts, that is, the part with positive attributes (having the properties of brightness, fire, heat, lightness, thinness, dynamic and masculine) and the part with negative attributes.The latter essentially only shows the absence and lack of the former, that is, the positive attributes.Therefore, he described this part lacking positive attributes as dark, earthy, cold, heavy, and thick—in short, yin and passive in nature.

Instead of such expressions as "heads" and "sides," he used the absolute terms "being" and "not being," from which he derived the principle that, contrary to Anaximander's view, our world In itself contains something that is, and, of course, something that is not.We should not look outside the world, as if beyond our horizon, for what exists.On the contrary, right before our eyes, at any time and place, in all becoming, there is something that exists and is working. 9.3 The "God of Eros" Beyond Reason Here, however, he still has a task left, which is to specifically answer the question "what is generation".This is the moment when he has to jump in order not to fall, although perhaps to a nature like Parmenides all jumping itself would be considered a fall.Let's just put it this way: we're going to fall into the mist, into the mysticism of "qualitates soccultae" (qualitates soccultae), and even into mythology a little bit.

Parmenides, like Heraclitus, intuitively perceives the universal becoming and changing, and can only explain the passing away as the error of the non-existent.For how can beings be responsible for passing away!But becoming also has to be established with the help of non-existent, because, since being always exists, it cannot be produced from itself, it cannot explain becoming.Therefore, whether it comes into being or disappears, it is all caused by the opposite property.However, becoming has a content, and disappearing loses a content, the premise is that the positive attribute (that is, the above-mentioned content) also participates in the two processes.In short, the following principle follows: "What is and what is not, are necessary for becoming; when they act together, there is becoming."

However, how do positive attributes and negative attributes approach each other?As opposites, do they not always avoid each other, making all becoming impossible?Here Parmenides appeals to a "secret quality," a mysterious tendency of opposites to approach and attract each other, and, using the name of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, he uses the everyday familiarity of yin and yang. Relationship, as a symbol of this opposite.Aphrodite's power lies in her bringing together opposites, what is and what is not.A passion leads to the combination of factors which conflict and repel each other, and the result is becoming.If passion is satisfied, hatred and inner conflict cause the being and the non-being to separate again - at this point, it is said: "This thing is gone".