Chapter 63 Ten Parmenides II Pale Truths

Philosophy in the Age of Greek Tragedy Ten Parmenides II Pale Truths 10.1 New enlightenment However, no one can accept such terrible abstractions as "existent" and "non-existent" without being shocked, and the blood of those who touch it will gradually freeze.One day, Parmenides had a sudden whim and found that all his early logical concepts had lost all value, so he preferred to treat them like a discarded sack. The old coins were set aside.It is generally believed that in that enlightenment not only the inner compulsive reasoning of concepts like "being" and "non-being" were at work, but also an external influence, that is, Parmenides recognized Corot The theology of Xenophanes, the wandering rhapsody-singer of ancient times, sang mystical and apotheotic praises of nature.

Xenophanes had an extraordinary career as a wandering poet who wandered to become a well-informed and instructive man, good at asking questions and telling stories.In this sense, therefore, Heraclitus ranks him with the polymath, and generally with the "historical" nature.How and when his mystical tendencies took shape and remained constant no one can now ascertain.Perhaps, when he finished his conception, he was already an old man who finally settled down. After going through the labyrinth and endless exploration, his soul felt the acme of sublime and greatness in the original peaceful atmosphere of pantheism—— A divine rest, an atmosphere of permanence.Moreover, it seems to me that it was purely accidental that two persons had lived together for some time at exactly the same place, in Elia, and that they both had in their minds a unified idea.

They did not form a school, nor did they share anything that they could learn from each other and then pass on further.For, in these two persons, the source of that unified idea is completely different, even opposite.If one of them ever tries to understand the doctrine of the other, he must translate it into his own language just to understand it.In such a translation, however, the character of the other doctrine is inevitably lost. If Parmenides relied entirely on a so-called logical reasoning to derive the oneness of beings and wove it out with the concepts of being and non-being, then Xenophanes was a religious mystic who And his mystical one is quite typical of the sixth century BC.Although he does not have the revolutionary character of Pythagoras, he also has the same tendency and impulse to improve, purify and cure mankind during his wandering career.He is an ethical teacher, but not at the level of a rhapsody reciter.Later, he seems to have been a wise man (Sophist).No one in the land of Greece could match him in boldly opposing established customs and values.Therefore, he never retreated into solitude like Heraclitus and Plato, but faced the public directly.It is this public whose admiration for Homer, their devotion to festival gymnastics championships, their admiration of human stones, he scornfully attacks, though not in loud and vile way of attacking.Personal freedom reached its peak in him.His kinship with Parmenides lay in this almost infinite freedom from all conventions, not in the final divine oneness; The one, the one, and Parmenides' idea of ​​the sole being have few common expressions and terms, let alone common sources.

10.2 Rejection of Dialectical Thinking Parmenides was, rather, in a state of reverse when he constructed his doctrine of Being.That day, in this state, he examined his pair of interacting pairs (whose passion and hatred constitute the world and becoming), the being and the non-being, the positive and negative properties— —And he suddenly had doubts about the concept of the opposite attribute, the non-existent.For how can something that does not exist be a property?Or, to ask a more fundamental question: how can "that which does not exist" exist?In fact, the tautology A=A is the only form of cognition in which we have always given absolute confidence, and it would be tantamount to madness to deny it.

It is this tautological realization that cries out to him relentlessly: what does not exist does not exist!What exists exists! He suddenly felt that his previous life bore a great logical guilt.He has always concluded without thinking: there are negative attributes, and there are non-existents; expressed by formula, this is A=not-A.I'm afraid, only a completely perverted mind would do this.As he reflected, most people judged with the same perversion, and he himself was merely participating in a common crime against logic. But at the very same moment when his crime was revealed to him, the light of discovery also shone on him.He found a principle, a key to the secrets of the world, which kept him from all human illusions.Now, with the big, strong, fearsome hand of the tautological truth of existence, he can plunge into the abyss of things.

On this road he met Heraclitus - an unfortunate encounter!He is preoccupied with the strictest distinction between being and non-being, and at this moment Heraclitus' game of antinomies is exactly what he abhors.Propositions such as "We both exist and we do not exist" and "Being and not being are both the same and not the same" messed up what he had just cleared up and made him furious. He cried: "Go away, those fellows who seem to have two heads and know nothing after all! In them, indeed, everything flows, including their thoughts! You stare at things darkly, but you must be deaf Blind again, so as to confuse opposites so much!"

For him, the irrational thinking of the masses, adorned with child's play antinomies, was held up as the pinnacle of all knowledge, a painful and incomprehensible event. 10.3 Rejection of sensory experience Now Parmenides basks in the cold bath of his awe-inspiring abstraction.Everything that exists must exist forever; it cannot be said that it "has existed" or "will exist".A being cannot be generated, for from what can it be generated?Never existed?But the non-existent does not exist and cannot produce anything.From beings?Beings do not produce anything other than themselves. The same is true of "passing away"; it is as impossible as becoming, like any change, like any increase, any decrease.In fact the only tenable propositions can only be: there is nothing of which it can be said "it was" or "will be"; exist".

A being is indivisible, for where is the second power that would divide it?It is immobile, for where should it move?It can be neither infinitely large nor infinitely small, because it is perfect, and a perfect given infinity is a contradiction.It is therefore floating, finite, perfect, immobile, equal in weight everywhere, equally perfect in every point, like a sphere, yet does not occupy a space, which otherwise would be The second being.But there cannot be multiple beings, because, in order to separate them, there must be something that does not exist.This is a self-dissolving assumption.Therefore, there is only eternal One.

Now, however, when Parmenides withdrew his gaze and saw again the world of becoming, whose existence he had earlier tried to grasp by ingenious logical reasoning, he was angry with his eyes and ears, for after all they saw and Heard generated. "Follow not the blinding eye," he ordered now, "follow not the roaring ear nor tongue, but test only by the power of thought!" He thus makes the first extremely important, yet still insufficient, and disastrous in its consequences, criticism of the human apparatus of cognition.He separated the senses from the faculty of abstract thought, that is, reason, as if they were two faculties completely separate from each other, and thus destroyed reason itself, and involuntarily separated the "spirit" from the "body."Such a utterly false split has been cast upon philosophy like a curse, especially since Plato.

Parmenides affirms that all sensory perceptions provide only illusions, the chief illusion being precisely that they create the illusion that what does not exist exists, that becoming also has a being.All the variety and richness of that world known by experience, its qualitative changes, its order of ascents and descents, are mercilessly cast aside as mere illusions and illusions.Nothing is to be gained from it, that is to say, all the efforts one has put into this falsified, completely useless world, as if tricked by the senses, are in vain. Whoever makes a general judgment like Parmenides will no longer be a natural scientist who explores parts.His sympathy for phenomena withered, and he even hated all phenomena, including himself, for the perpetual deception of his inability to escape his senses.Truth should now dwell only in the palest, most abstract generals, in the shells of the most indeterminate words, as in a spider's web.And near such a "truth" sits a philosopher as anemic as an abstraction, wrapped in a weave of formulas.After all, the spider still wants to eat the blood of its victims, and the Parmenidean philosopher hates the blood of his victims most, the blood of the empirical reality he sacrifices.