Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy by Kōjin Karatani

Author:Kōjin Karatani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press

PARMENIDES

Heraclitus and Parmenides

Parmenides is typically regarded as having played the most important role in the shift from Ionian natural philosophy to Athenian philosophy. However, this view is chiefly that of the Athenian philosophers. It seems rather, to me, that what brought about a decisive shift in Ionian philosophy was Pythagoras, and that Heraclitus and Parmenides were figures that resisted this change. It is clear at a glance that the combative political stance and ties to natural philosophy place Heraclitus close to the Ionian school, but the case of Parmenides is not so clear. The method of indirect proof he developed seems like a new element not found in the Ionian thinkers. Plato utilized this as a weapon to unseat Ionian natural philosophy. In fact, however, indirect proof has its origins in Ionia as well.

Parmenides had deep ties to Ionia. He was a citizen of Elea, a Greek colony settled by Ionian immigrants. He is said to have been influenced by the Pythagorean school and taken residence with its order for a time. This story has the effect of separating Parmenides from the tradition of the Ionian school. On the other hand, Aristotle writes in the Metaphysics, “It is said that Parmenides was a pupil of Xenophanes.” Pythagoras, despite his Ionian origin, rejected Ionian philosophy. The Ionian Xenophanes, on the other hand, placed himself completely within its lineage. Consequently, to affirm one of these accounts seems to entail rejecting the other. However, there is no need to make a choice. It becomes coherent if we understand that Parmenides received early training with the Pythagorean school and then became a pupil of Xenophanes, a critic of the Pythagoreans who immigrated from Ionia. This is to see the lifelong task of Parmenides as lying in overcoming Pythagorean thought, to which he had at one time devoted himself, from a position internal to it. This indicated as well a recuperation of Ionian thinking.

We need to examine another deep-seated prejudice in this respect. Parmenides said, “What-is is, for being is, and nothing is not.”17 That is to say, one cannot simultaneously exist and not exist. Heraclitus, on the other hand, says, “All things are in flux.” “Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not” (65, B49a). There seems to be an opposition or criticism here to Parmenides’s formulation. This was Hegel’s understanding. Based on this view, Hegel treated Heraclitus as a thinker subsequent to Parmenides:

With the Eleatics [for Hegel principally Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Zeno], we have the abstract understanding that Being is alone the truth; however, this universal principle is better characterized as Becoming, the truth of Being. Being is merely the first, direct notion to be thought.… Heraclitus states that all is Becoming; this is the universal principle. To pass from Being to Becoming demonstrates a great boldness of thought. Even if, as the unity of opposite determinations it is still abstract, it represents the first step toward the concrete. Because in this opposition of being and nonbeing both must be unrestful and contain within themselves the vivid principle of life.

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