The first known Greek philosophers focused on aspects of the physical surroundings that people could observe with the eyes and measure. This befit the natural environment, economics, and politics in their city, Miletus, which prospered from commerce in the eastern Mediterranean and in the Black Sea. But in the mid-fifth century BCE, several leading Western thinkers took steps toward ideas that became more mainstream in India when the Upanishads were composed.
Parmenides lived in Elea, which was a city on Italy’s southwestern coast. He might have governed it for a while. The second century CE historian Plutarch wrote that he put the town in order with a system of laws that was so good that its government annually made the people swear to abide by them. He was also supposed to have been a member of a local group of healers. Parmenides’ contemplations made him one of the West’s most influential philosophers.
He concluded that everything is based on being. He began with one idea: It is, or it is not. Being is the most basic truth, and this truth is eternal—it doesn’t change. Some of his contemporaries and later followers felt that he said that there could not have been a time prior to the present, since that would have required a process of becoming, and that means partial existence. There can never be a future because that would imply passing out of existence. There is only existence in the present moment. Others have thought that Parmenides only said that being is timeless, but the specific beings that being underlies do change. This remains an open question, but the possibility that change does not happen bothered many Greeks, since the leading Milesian thinkers focused on transformations in nature.
Parmenides has been credited with more conclusions that disturbed other Greek thinkers. Being is also continuous in space, so he has been credited with thinking that there is no empty space; there is no void in which being isn’t fundamental. Some thinkers felt that he concluded that there is no motion, since there is no void for things to move in. This idea challenged many of his contemporaries because it went against the senses and common sense.
He wrote that reality is continuous, whole, complete, indivisible, immobile, untrembling, without a beginning, and eternal. It is also not somewhat more here and somewhat less there, but full everywhere. Most people mistakenly think that their changing perspectives of what they see are real, but basic reality does not change. Parmenides was one of the first Western thinkers to blatantly distrust the senses. This was so counterintuitive for most Greeks that every thinker had to come to terms with his ideas. The Milesian philosophers had greatly relied on vision, and the Homeric poems are ravishingly visual. Philosophers and poets were used to coastal lands with clear boundaries and–
–watercraft that stood out as distinct objects.
Where was Parmenides coming from? Opinions widely differ. According to a previously dominant view, he felt that there is no multitude of things in the universe; all things are One. But in the late 20th century, several historians of philosophy concluded that he focused on the logic of intellectual inquiry rather than grand metaphysical principles. In other words, a specific object we inquire about exists and cannot not exist. Parmenides outlined the characteristics that something must have in order to be a valid subject of inquiry. They don’t, however, preclude a multitude of things or their abilities to move. Each thing’s definition should be un-generated, imperishable, and changeless, but many things can exist and move around. Being is their common denominator, and that’s what doesn’t change.
Some historians have praised Parmenides as the first systematic thinker because he began with an idea that he treated as an absolute truth (It is or it is not) and methodically thought through its implications. He has also been admired as a proto-scientific thinker because he sharply distinguished truth from falsehood and advanced the Greeks along the path to abstract thought.
But by fifth century CE, some writers thought he was a mystic, including Proclus, who was one of late antiquity’s most honored thinkers. He saw his own ideas about a unified and spiritual universe in Parmenides’ statements about the oneness of being. The historian M. L. West thought Parmenides had mystical experiences and that they inspired him to think of reality as indivisible, immobile, and timeless. West thought he combined the spiritual influences with Greek rationalist traditions to give his ideas about being a logical foundation.
Richard Seaford thinks Parmenides was partly influenced by mystic revelation when he described being as whole and untrembling, though he also thinks that the new use of money, with its universal and abstract value, also encouraged him to think of being as universal and uninfluenced by any particular thing.
Whether Parmenides focused on achieving mystical oneness with the universe or not, he expressed his view of the cosmos with several traditional Greek ideas of distinct entities and proportion:
- At the beginning of his poem, a chariot driven by daughters of the sun carried an unnamed man who is generally considered to have been Parmenides through the gates where day and night successively go forth. The maidens persuaded Justice (Dike) to open the gates, and they took him to an unnamed goddess who greeted him. She explained that being is bound by Necessity (Anagke), which holds it to a limit in all directions. It is thus complete in every direction like a sphere. It is equidistant in every direction from the center, for it must not be any larger or smaller here or there. Like Anaximander, Parmenides imagined reality as a sphere and emphasized its equal proportions in all directions.
- She then described the earth, moon, sun, and other stars, declaring that Necessity shackled the surrounding heaven to hold their motions to limits. The goddess continued by explaining that fiery rings of increasing size are nested in each other and that a goddess steers the course of all things from an area between the innermost and outermost (the circles of fire echo Anaximander’s cosmology). Instead of the wealth of Indian ideas of subtle energies profusely flowing from the universe’s origin, Parmenides described the same tangible physical objects and proportionality that his predecessors in Miletus did.
- She explained sexual reproduction and recounted how people are born. The female unites with the male, boys are conceived in the right side of the uterus, and girls in the left. A formative power builds their bodies from a balance of the parents’ bloods. They thus came from a visible substance rather than invisible Vedic energies.
- He asserted the unity of being by using deductive argument. He identified being as the most basic principle in the universe, sharply contrasted it with non-being, and deduced his other ideas (e.g., being is permanent, complete, and changeless) from this dichotomy. He has been called the first philosopher to identify a contradiction (it cannot both be and not be; it must be altogether or not at all) to justify his ideas. The historian of philosophy David Sedley said that every step he took towards the truth was hard-won by argument.
Book 10, Sukta 129 of the Rigveda contrasts with Parmenides by saying that the existent was not and the nonexistent was not at the time of creation. There was only darkness and a signless ocean. The power of heat (tapas) began to produce the world. Desire (kama) then evolved as the first seed of thought. Instead of Parmenides focusing on being as the only valid fundamental state and contrasting it with its opposite, the Vedic hymn unifies the opposites and begins creation with more primary energies which emanate as the universe and its diverse and densely integrated life forms.
One of Parmenides’ most influential followers, Empedocles, came from Akragas (in Sicily—now called Agrigento) to southern Italy. He’s an equally mysterious figure, and historians of philosophy still disagree on what he considered most fundamental in the universe. On one hand, he sounds mystical, claiming to have had been incarnated many times. He said that he had been a boy, a girl, a bush, a bird, and a fish. He also said that everyone should avoid killing and meat eating, because all beings are related through reincarnation. He additionally declared that it’s not possible to reach the divine with our eyes or hands. One of his two known poems (some historians think they were parts of the same poem), Purifications, explains that the human soul was once pure, but it defiled itself by shedding blood and swearing false oaths. It now must undergo a series of incarnations for 30,000 seasons or years, continuously changing one baleful life for another. But his other poem, On Nature, focused on physically tangible and proportioned reality:
- He said that there are four basic substances, which have sometimes been translated as elements, but roots is more accurate. He used the word rhizomata, which the modern botanical word rhizome descended from. Aristotle later called them elements, but Empedocles seems to have thought of them as living sources from which things grow. The roots are fire, air (aither—the upper atmospheric air rather than the air we breathe on earth, which Greeks called aer), water, and earth. They’re eternal and fixed in quantity. They don’t change into each other, their basic qualities do not change, and they’re never destroyed. Empedocles took Parmenides’ idea of being as ungenerated and applied it to the four elements/roots, thus allowing multiplicity in nature.
- Two forces cause the four elements/roots to move in opposite directions. Love (Eros) brings them together, and Strife (Neikos) forces them apart by making them repel each other. Empedocles said that he was telling a double tale. At one time, the elements/roots converge into one out of many, coming together through Love. Then, through Strife, they increasingly repulse each other and separate.
- Love and Strife are equal “in every way.” The elements/roots are also equal. The universe is thus proportioned and symmetrical, as Milesian thinkers saw it.
- When all things are unified through Love, the cosmos is a sphere, equal to itself in all directions. Empedocles seems to have inherited the concept of a perfect geometric sphere from Parmenides and Milesians.
- When Strife has finished its work, the four elements/roots have become separate and now exist in four rings, with the heaviest (earth) in the center and the progressively lighter around it in the sequence of water, air, and fire. The concept of mass was thus paramount in Empedocles’ universe even though it wasn’t precisely defined with the mathematics of Newtonian physics.
- When the four elements come together, they mix into the things we see, which Empedocles listed as humans, animals, trees, and fish. He also included the gods, thus integrating his thought with the older Homeric and Hesiodic traditions.
- He said that bones consist of two parts earth, two parts water, and four parts fire. This suggests that he saw substances as fixed proportions of the elements/roots. He likened the creation of things to a painter mixing pigments. The artist blends more of some hues and less of others to form harmonies which people enjoy while viewing them.
- Blood around the heart is the seat of thought because the blood arose from all four elements/roots. He thus saw thought in terms of a physically tangible substance rather than Upanishadic ideas of an invisible space within the heart or invisible patterns of energy from brahman, which flow throughout the cosmos.
Both Parmenides and Empedocles envisioned a unified cosmos in which all beings are integrated with each other, but unlike Vedic poets and Upanishadic thinkers, they inherited concepts and mental horizons from Homeric poems, Hesiod, the Milesian philosophers, and their fellow Greeks conducting business and settling legal conflicts in agoras, living near coastlines, and fashioning art with static proportions. All these traditions emerged during several generations of living in small communities in a landscape that was human scale, dominated by the sea, and clearly proportioned into distinct domains.
Westerners have often thought of ideas as distinct objects, but they converge from many types of experience, and this makes them meaningful enough to seem to capture the most basic aspects of reality. Many experiences reinforced each other in ancient Greece, including politics, theater, athletic games, the natural environment, agriculture, the colonization movement, and city life. All together encouraged people to see reality as distinct entities, linear relationships between them, and static proportioned geometric shapes rather than the vast and abundant space-time field that most ancient Indian thinkers considered basic.
The next article will examine more roots of what Westerners have considered to be most fundamental. Basic assumptions ain’t so basic; they converge from many dimensions within a cultural landscape.