Reality, Perception and the One: The Introduction of Metaphysics

1. XENOPHANES

One god, greatest among gods and men, in no way

similar to mortals either in body or in thought...

All of him sees, all of him thinks, all of him hears...

Always he remains in the same place, moving not at all...

But without toil he shakes all things with the thought

of his mind.

Xenophanes, Fragments 23, 24, 25.

In 546 the Persians conquered Ionia, and refugees from the upper classes scattered abroad to every part of the Greek world. One of these, Xenophanes (571–after 483 bce) left his home in Colophon to wander, for the rest of his long life, as a professional poet among the Greek settlements of southern Italy.

Xenophanes’s physical views develop the already existing science of the Ionians. He refers what happens aloft to clouds arising through evaporation from the seas, and undergoing transformation into St. Elmo’s fire, rainbow, glowing stars, the sun and the moon. The point seems to be to establish that none of these are gods. He remarks on moisture found in caves, and takes fossils of sea creatures found on land to indicate a universal flood sometime in the past. This confirmed mythological tradition. It looks as though he thought the earth gradually washed into the sea, finally disappearing entirely and turning the sea to mud. We have no information how he thought earth and water separated out again. He is sometimes said to have made the primary stuff earth, so that all four elements can be covered by himself, Heraclitus, Anaximenes and Thales, but he is elsewhere more plausibly credited with the view that all things arise from earth and water.

Xenophanes’s theology, on the other hand, breaks entirely new ground in its use of argument, rather than revelation or authority, to establish the truth about the gods. It rejects the old mythology wholesale. Its errors he attributes to uncritical anthropomorphism—Thracians, we are told in his satyric verses, think of the gods as blue-eyed blondes, the Ethiopians think of them as snub-nosed and black, and lions, had they an opinion, would no doubt think of them as lions.

Xenophanes thought the gods in fact stood outside the natural order of the Cosmos, and were similar to nothing found within it. Most especially, they do not compete with one another as things do within the Cosmos, since no god stands in need of anything. Thus no god is master of any other. In his more serious poetry he warns us against disrespect towards the gods, and urges that there is one God who is greatest, and, unlike lesser gods, remains always in one place, unmoving, and without effort “shakes all things by the impulse of will arising from his perception of the truth.” Moreover, all of him sees, hears, and perceives the truth, and he governs all things with a wise providence. It is tempting to equate this greatest God with the stuff making up the world, like Heraclitean fire, so perhaps it is the Earth. But if Xenophanes held to several kinds of fundamental stuff, or identified no fundamental stuff at all, then it gets more difficult, and it has been suggested instead that this God is, like the Goddess of Parmenides’s Way of Opinion, Love and Strife in Empedocles, and Mind in Anaxagoras, something standing outside and controlling the stuff making up the world. He may have modeled this God on the Justice of Anaximander, conceived as personal, but still sustaining an unchanging universal law applied even-handedly to all things. Indeed, since this God is unlimited, that is, is not placed in any external environment or situation, it could not have any motive to vary from a perfect and abstract justice. Aristotle and Theophrastus report that Xenophanes made his God neither finite nor infinite, which suggests a non-spatial being, and Aristotle also reports that Xenophanes speaks of God as one “with his eye on the whole universe,” though he did not make it clear in what sense God is one —perhaps God is the one governor of all things.

As for the lesser gods, the Atomists, who often followed the Ionian tradition closely, later held that there were gods living outside the Cosmos, made of atoms like everything else, but long-lived due to their undisturbed peace in the surrounding void. Xenophanes, too, may have conceived the lower gods as long-lived beings found in the peaceful regions above the heavenly bodies. If so, behind his views lies this argument: A god lives a life free of the suffering and doing of evil, and such a life is unattainable in this lower region, where competition and injustice, arising from the production of many opposing things, makes individual perfection impossible. As Homer remarked, only the gods receive happiness unalloyed, and we mortals must suffer, at best, blessings mixed with pain. As the price of their perfect happiness, the lower gods exercise no influence on the cosmos. They don’t answer people’s prayers, or guard justice in the world. Were they to become involved in the affairs of the cosmos, they could no longer remain undisturbed in their happiness. Xenophanes must have observed how frustrated the Olympians of Homer often are when they take the part of mortals in their conflicts. Indeed, not only is the ideal life impossible within the natural order of our cosmos, it is impossible even in the most ideal natural order—the gods cannot interact even with one another, lest they limit one another and ideal happiness be lost.

This ideal life without limitation by others is not restricted to isolated deities outside the cosmos, but is also enjoyed by the unlimited force that rules the totality of things. Does this Unlimited interfere in the affairs of mortals? That it ‘shakes all things’ and rules by a wise providence suggests that it does so, but it need in fact meet no opposition in its activity. Nothing in the world resists natural law, things only resist other things in accord with natural law. The lesser gods, on the other hand, would meet resistance were they to interfere in the world’s affairs.

Simplicius’s report of Theophrastus attributes to Xenophanes the view that “if there be a multiplicity of things, it is necessary that power should exist in them all alike; but the most powerful and most excellent of all things is god.” This suggests that Xenophanes had an argument for the existence of the one God, to the effect that there is but one system of natural law governing the world, and its source is to be identified as an all-powerful, unlimited God. This God is the best and strongest, and cannot have come into being from anything worse or weaker. That means he cannot have come into being from anything at all, unless it is from himself, or from nothing, and both these options are absurd. So God has not come into being at all, and has no beginning. Similarly, God fears no destruction, and has no end.

Xenophanes may also have argued for God’s unity from the fact that He is unlimited, since two gods would limit one another. The highest God would be unlimited because nothing stands outside Him (outside of his control). Thus God would necessarily be the strongest and best, since everything else depends on God, the unlimited source of all, for its being.

Further, we are assured that God is similar in every part, else some part would be better than another. This sounds a bit odd, but it would certainly apply to Anaximenes’s air or Heraclitus’s fire as the rulers of all things. But Xenophanes did not identify a single underlying stuff, and so one should refer this opinion to his argument for the one, for if God is posited as that which rules all things, then if any portion of God ruled the rest of God, that portion, rather than the whole, would have to be identified as God.

In Xenophanes, though, as in the Ionian thinkers in general, the divinity of the world did not mean that it aimed at any particular good or purpose. Xenophanes urges respect for the gods, and he says God is good, but he does not expect God’s help in his particular affairs. God’s providence, if we can speak of this, is not a particular providence, but a general providence, like that of an impartial judge. He enforces justice in all things, and for this very reason has no attachment to the fate of individual persons. In the development of his notion of God, Xenophanes develops the Ionian notion of natural law as a result of a perfectly impartial law established for the good of the whole, but enforced even-handedly without the expression of any personal interests on the part of the enforcer (who is unlimited and so has no interests), or any regard for the particular fates of individuals.

2. PARMENIDES

It is proper that you should learn all things, both the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth, and the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true reliance.

Parmenides, Fragment 8.28-30

Some removed generation and destruction from the world altogether. Nothing that is, they said, is generated or destroyed, and our conviction to the contrary is an illusion. So maintained the school of Melissus and Parmenides. But however excellent their theories may otherwise be, anyhow they cannot be held to speak as students of nature. There may be things not subject to generation or any kind of movement, but if so they belong to another and a higher inquiry than the study of nature. They, however, had no idea of any form of being other than the substance of things perceived; and when they saw, what no one previously had seen, that there could be no knowledge or wisdom without some such unchanging entities, they naturally transferred what was true of them to things perceived.

Aristotle, De Caelo III 1.

But there are some who spoke of the universe as if it were one entity . . . they do not, like some of the natural philosophers, assume being to be one and yet generate it out of the one as out of matter, but they speak in another way; those others add change, since they generate the universe, but these thinkers say the universe is unchangeable. . . Parmenides seems to fasten on that which is one in definition, Melissus on that which is one in matter, for which reason the former says that it is limited, the latter that it is unlimited; while Xenophanes, the first of these partisans of the One (for Parmenides is said to have been his pupil), gave no clear statement, nor does he seem to have grasped the nature of either of these causes, but with reference to the whole material universe he says the One is God. . . Parmenides. . . claiming that, besides what is, nothing is that is not, thinks that of necessity one thing is, viz. what is and nothing else . . ., but being forced to follow the observed facts, and supposing the being of what is one in definition, but more than one according to our sensations, he now posits two causes and two principles, calling them hot and cold, i.e. fire and earth; and of these he ranges the hot with what is, and the other with what is not.

Aristotle, Metaphysics I 5

Xenophanes apparently said that his God does not breathe. Probably the remark is meant as a rejection of Pythagorean views—it does not breathe in any limiting void. The totality (of what is) is everything that is, and there is not anything, certainly not some nothing, standing outside it.

Xenophanes would have seen no reason as an Ionian to postulate a nothing so that a fundamental stuff could, through its various admixture with the void, take on its various forms. Anaximenes did not think that air changed form by condensation and rarefaction, through change in density depending on how much of the void is mixed with it. Rather it changes in somewhat the way a white sauce does as it thickens. The sauce does not change appreciably in density, but only in its consistency. Similarly, water freezes into ice, but does not become more dense, but actually a bit less so, when it does. It was Parmenides, examining the Milesian’s views from his Pythagorean background, who took it that only one stuff making up the world could not have different characteristics at different times and places, so that any variation in it had to be explained as due to its structure, the way it was arranged in space, and hence, within the Ionian system, due to its density.

Xenophanes, then, thought the postulation of the Pythagorean limit, a ‘nothing,’ plainly absurd, for everything that is is something. If we are to give an account how the universe is shaped and developed, we must do so by reference to something, to the unlimited God, perhaps. How can we permit scientists to include ‘nothing’ on the list of things that are, the things they take to make up the world, and make it central to their explanations of what we observe? His rejection of the Pythagorean limit had momentous consequences, for it suggested a new style of argumentation to Parmenides of Elea (born 515-510, active 490-480 bce) that promised a road to absolute certainty concerning some, necessary truths about the cosmos, and those certainties implied that the world as it really is differs significantly from the way it appears to human beings—as it really is, it is a world without change or opposition.

Parmenides was probably a citizen of Elea at the city’s founding, when a young man of 25 or 30. He was rich and of distinguished family. The tradition was that he was taught by a Pythagorean, Ameinias, to whom he erected a Hero’s shrine, so that we can reasonably assume that he was initiated into the Pythagorean mysteries, and perhaps that he credited Ameinias with founding a new religious fraternity or perhaps even the city itself. He was also said to have been a follower of Xenophanes, though this tale lacks supporting detail, and it seems likely that Xenophanes influenced Parmenides chiefly through his criticism of the Pythagoreans, which may have been reasonably well-known at the time even to many who had not met its author. From archaeological evidence, we now know that Parmenides was the founder of a cult of healing at Elea. The cult used ‘incubation’, in which patients, under the guidance of the priest, would withdraw into a cavern sacred

to Apollo, often for some days, where they would fast and take steps to enter into a suitable trance, and receive the cure in a dream. This cult seems to have been a continuation of one in Phocaea, the mother city, whose sacred objects the citizens had taken with them when they left home to escape Persian domination, removing first to Corsica and then Elea. Apollo, as the Sun, resided in the underworld, from which he journeyed each day across the sky in his chariot, and so was the God of the Dead, like the Egyptian Osiris. The sacred cave would serve as a passage to the underworld where one could receive his advice, for he was, again like Osiris, also the God of healing.

Parmenides’s views come down to us in fragments preserved from his poem, The Way of Truth and the Way of Opinion. The poem opens with the author’s allegorical journey away from the human realm of light and darkness, in a chariot drawn by mares, and guided by the daughters of the Sun. They have come from the Halls of Night into the light, and pushed back the veils from their faces for this purpose. The chariot travels into the underworld to the verge of Tartaros, the great gap between earth and sky, where Night and Day alternate residence when they are not journeying over the earth—neutral ground where the opposites both dwell. Here, not in the Light, is where truth is to be found. Justice herself, always a guardian of the underworld, admits them to the house, and a goddess, most likely Persephone, wife to Hades and mistress of the Underworld, relates to Parmenides both the truth about things, and how things must seem to mortal men. The intention is that the truth will, in equity, lean to neither side, recognizing neither of any pair of opposing factors. The inspiration of the goddess is the source of truth, and it is very likely that Parmenides is reporting a truth that he realized while sleeping or meditating in a sacred cave.

Parmenides’s argument begins with the insistence that we can speak and think only of what is, never of what is not—“whatever is for thinking and saying must be, for it can be, whereas what is not cannot.” There are two ways in which this might be taken. We will examine first the hypothesis that Parmenides intends ‘what is’ as ‘what exists’ —“whatever exists for thinking and saying must exist, for it can exist whereas what does not exist cannot.” The best argument scholars have been able to contrive for Parmenides on this line would run as follows: (1) if something can be spoken of or thought of, it must be a possible thing, and so it can exist; (2) what does not exist cannot possibly come to be, and so it is not the case that it can exist; therefore (3) everything that can be spoken or thought of exists. The argument seems to follow well enough, but how would one justify the premisses?

The first premise, that whatever can be spoken or thought of can exist, has seemed clearly true to many thinkers, including, in the 20^th century, both Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Indeed, Wittgenstein accepts the whole argument in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, though his elaboration and support for it is far more sophisticated than anything Parmenides could have had in mind. It might be objected that one has to think about impossible things to determine that they are impossible. How can I tell there are no round squares if I don’t think about them? The answer suggested by Wittgenstein is that I don’t think about (or speak of) round squares, but about round things and square things, and thereby discover that I can’t think about (or speak of) round square things. Every impossibility is a complex, a complex composed of possible things—things that can’t be arranged in the relations to one another that would bring about the impossible complex.

What about the second premise, that what does not exist cannot exist? Surely we can talk about things that do not exist, and yet could exist—I might speak of my first grandchild, for instance, before either of my daughters has ever been pregnant. But perhaps Parmenides would have said that I must refer to an actual, existent grandchild, even if it is only existent in the future, if I am to succeed in referring to anything. (One takes a risk of failing to refer to anything at all when one speaks of such things as future grandchildren.) Say I take myself to be referring to something that does not yet exist, but can change in such a way as to come into existence. What kind of thing is this, and what kind of change would it undergo? After all, it is not there to change in the first place. What does not exist simply is not available to have anything happen to it, and so it cannot come to exist.

But perhaps there is a possible-grandchild, which might take on actuality and become an existing grandchild? But surely when I say it is possible that I should have a grandchild, I only mean to say that at some time the sentence “I have a grandchild” may be true. I don’t mean to refer to a possible-grandchild already there, as it were, that may or may not succeed in becoming existent! If there is such a thing, exactly where does it wait to find out it is going to exist or not? So we might maintain with some reason that one cannot talk about what does not exist, and when we are tempted to say we have talked about something that does not exist, we should say that we have failed to talk about anything at all.

To look at a different example, involving a sort of thing rather than a specific individual, we might think about unicorns that they don’t exist. Are we thinking about anything? Surely we should not hold that we are thinking about unicorns and supposing them to have the property of non-existence. Wouldn’t they have to exist to have this property? It would be much better to hold that one is thinking about the things that exist, and supposing that they do not include unicorns among them, that is, each of them fails to have the defining characteristics of unicorns. Or we might hold that we are thinking about existing elements that can be combined to make a unicorn, a horn and a horse, say, but never are. We can explain how we “think about unicorns” without supposing that thinking about them puts us into some relationship with actual (but non-existent) unicorns. To think about unicorns is really to think about something else, say, horns and horses, and this something else exists.

This is a valiant effort, and really does reflect one line of 20^th century thought, but it has been pointed out that it does not fit the texts as well as it might, and that there is a more readily defensible line of thought, much more closely related to what we know about the thinkers who responded to Parmenides. This second way of interpreting Parmenides’s argument would take it that he means to speak not of existence, but of ‘predicative being,’ that is, being a kind of thing. Then his argument would be that if we are to speak or think of something, there must be a description of it that captures what it really is in itself, it must be something. (I assume unicorns are something, horses with horns, whether they exist or not. Indeed, we have to know what they are to investigate the question if such things exist.) We might argue this as follows: If we have no description to pick a thing out, we refer to we know not what, which means we don’t refer to anything at all. If we do have a description, and it describes what we intend as it really is in itself, then we have a grasp of its essential nature. What if the description only applies to the thing accidentally? For instance, I might refer to “the cause of this movement” without having any idea what the cause is. It turns out the cause is in fact some physical force not commonly encountered that only a physicist would understand, and I am not a physicist. Have I referred to this physical force? Well, I certainly don’t know that I have, since I don’t even know there is such a thing to refer to. But I have referred to it more or less by a stroke of luck, because (unbeknownst to me) it happens to fall under a description I do understand, namely “the cause of this movement.” (It might easily exist, of course, without falling under that description.) What am I referring to? I don’t know. As it happens, I have referred to the physical force, but that is accidental—I only intended to refer, and so only deliberately referred, to the cause of the movement. But for even the accidental reference to work, there must be something that is the cause of the movement, and it must be possible for someone to say what that cause is, considered in itself, not considered under the description that enables me to get hold of it. Else we cannot make out how it is that it fits the description I have of it, why it should cause that movement. We cannot allow that the cause of the movement is intrinsically unspecifiable and indefinite and still hold onto the notion that I have referred to something in saying “the cause of the movement.” If it is indefinite, that means there is no cause of the movement. Indefiniteness is a result, always, of our ignorance or imprecision, not a property real things have as they really are in themselves.

So, whatever we are speaking or thinking about must be something (something we know about), and it must be just exactly that, always and everywhere, that is, it must be some one, definite thing. We can only refer to it (unless we rely on a stroke of luck) if we identify it as that something. The argument becomes, (1) if something can be spoken of or thought of, it must be a possible thing, and so it is something definite (some nature that can be exemplified); (2) what is not some definite thing (does not have some definite nature) cannot be (it can neither be anything, nor can it exist); therefore (3) everything that can be spoken or thought of is (that is, it is some one definite thing essentially). There are difficulties with this view, but they are not at all obvious, and Plato and Aristotle, living only a little after Parmenides, clearly held to it, so it seems to provide a superior option to the existence interpretation.

Reading the first argument to concern predicative being, the possession of a real nature, rather than existence fits the view Plato takes of Parmenides in his later dialogues, and fits Aristotle’s remark that Parmenides considered what is one in nature, and so insisted that each thing we think about be something definite, not something indefinite. Both approaches would rule out the possibility of a Pythagorean limit breathed in by what is, for such a limit, the nothing that lies outside what exists, seems to be something with no nature of its own by which it can be identified. It is also to be noted, though, that both views of the argument leave it open that there might in some sense be many things. There could be many different things of different sorts, as long as each existed, or was a unified kind, entirely of a definite nature, and unchanging in its nature. Moreover, each sort of thing would have to be the sort of thing it is in itself, not in virtue of some opposition to another nature. If darkness is taken as the absence or opposite of light, then all that really is (the only nature really identified here) is light. But darkness might be identified as its own sort of thing, which is possible quite independently of the possibility of light. So Parmenides’s attack is primarily on the Pythagorean system, with its postulation of what is and what is not to provide limits to what is. Secondarily, it rules out any physical explanation based in a monistic system like that of Anaximenes or Heraclitus, which allows for only one sort of underlying reality. It does not cut against the pluralism of Empedocles or Anaxagoras. Nor does it cut against a reformed Pythagoreanism in which the limiter of what is is provided with its own definite nature, as in Philolaus and the Atomists.

Parmenides apparently rejected the Ionian view that there was only one kind of stuff, because he thought variety could be introduced into this one stuff only by introducing a nothing into its midst. So he argued that the one kind of stuff can no more be more-here-than-there than it can fail entirely to be there, apparently intending to show that it was everywhere the same. Probably he did not see how it could be more-here-than-there unless it failed entirely to be in some of the places there so that nothing was there, or was somehow mixed with what is not, or perhaps somehow only partially lived up to its nature in some places, all of which are impossible. He seems to take this to count against the Ionian view because he conceives of Anaximenean air as condensing when Anaximenes says it thickens, since, like the Pythagoreans, he thinks that spatial rearrangement of the one stuff is the only source of variation in things. The limited without admixture of the unlimited has its own density, which never changes. So Parmenides thought neither the Pythagorean nor the Ionian strategy for constructing a world from a single kind of stuff would work.

Might we not introduce several kinds of stuff, then, to account for the appearance of change and opposition in the world? Parmenides considers this option in the second part of his poem, the Way of Opinion, suggesting that there might be two kinds of stuff, light and night:

But since all things have been named light and night, and their powers have been assigned to each, all is full of light and lightless night together, both equal, since nothingness partakes in neither.

So there is light and night, and where light is there is no night, and where night is there is no light, the two together fill all of space at every time, and the two are equal to on another. Any portion of either is something that is, and so always is and does not come to be or pass away. Parmenides goes on to develop the cosmology of the Way of Opinion from this assumption.

Still, there seems to be a problem. Parmenides speaks of the “ordering of his words” in the Way of Opinion as “capable of deception,” because it names two distinct forms of reality, and it is only necessary that there be (at least) one form. The point seems to be that we are here leaving the realm of necessary demonstration. Necessary demonstration has established that there must be something we can speak of, and so at least one sort of thing, but it has not established what is now supposed, that there are several, and most especially has not established that there are just these two, Light and Night. Parmenides is denying here the Principle of Sufficient Reason—there are these two sorts of thing, and no others, but there is no reason why this is so. It is, of course, observable that it is so, since there is variety and change in the world, and so there may be reason to believe that it is so, but there is no reason why it is so. It is not a necessary, demonstrable truth, and there is nothing we can know that is more basic from which it follows. It’s just so, a brute fact. Notice, however, that something of this sort must be so, if appearances are to be explicable. There must be two, or three, or four, or whatever definite number of underlying substances, each of some definite kind. As Plato would later put it when he advanced his own account of the physical world, the theory is put forward as “something like the truth.”

Parmenides is following, once more, Xenophanes, who had said, “certain truth no man has seen nor will there by anyone who knows about the gods and everything of which I speak, for even should he happen to say what is true he himself will not know this, and opinion is wrought over all.” Xenophanes speaks here of his opinions about the gods as uncertain, but not, it seems, his opinion about the One God, which is based on necessary reasoning, and not hypothesis or the senses. Parmenides takes this a step farther, suggesting not just that we might not happen to have conclusive reason for many of our true beliefs, but that there might not be any conclusive reasons to be had. The cosmogony laid out in the Way of Opinion, then, is presented as a plausible account something like the truth. It is as good a guess as any. It might just be right, something like it is right, and such a guess is as close as mortals can come to the truth, that is, truth-ascertained-with-certainty. It is presented so that no mortal will surpass the Goddess’s student.

But there may be a further issue: How is it understood what Night and Light is? If one of these is understood simply as the absence of the other, then it is understood as nothing, and cannot be thought. So each must have its own positive description, logically independent of the other. It may be that the presence of the positive qualities of Light rule out the positive qualities of Night, but they cannot simply consist in the absence of those qualities. So for Parmenides Light is bright, Night dark, and these two characteristics rule one another out, but each must have its own reality. Why do they rule one another out? Presumably they just do, and the thing cannot be demonstrated or known to be the case. It is on the same level as the postulation of just these two existing things is—something like this must be true, that is, it seems that some natures must rule out other natures, due to natural law, say, not logic, and we just have to guess which those are.

We know nothing of how Parmenides thought the cosmos might have developed, but we have a reliable report of its present structure in Theophrastus. His cosmos was spherical in shape, with an outer ring of Light, perhaps to be identified with the aether, and successive rings moving inward, of mixtures of Light and Night, one containing the sun and stars in a fairly dry aer, the next containing the moon, clouds and a damper aer, the next at the earth’s surface, with aer, water, and living organisms, and then a ring of Night, the solid earth, and below it a final ring of fire, which accounts for the easily observed volcanic activity near Elea in southern Italy. This corresponds quite closely to the account we shall find in Empedocles, and Empedocles, we shall see, supplements it with an account, possibly one dependent on material from Parmenides we no longer possess, how the situation arose.

In the midst of all this, we are told, is the Goddess, who “stirs all things,” and begins “the works of dreadful birth.” In a characteristically Pythagorean turn, Parmenides speaks of the Goddess as mixing male with female, and she seems to be a goddess of love. She serves, then, the same function as the God of Xenophanes, and Love and Strife in Empedocles. It is possible that the system was very close indeed to that of Empedocles, and that Strife also played a role, but is not now “in the midst” of the world, but has been pushed to the outside. In any case, the Goddess is not a kind of stuff, nor, it seems, is she the source of the laws of nature, since she intervenes in the world by stirring things and bringing them together, and depends on the natural effects of this stirring to produce the results she is after.

Finally, Theophrastus reports that at the outer rim, as well as in the center, there is a third sort of thing, a solid, which is neither Light nor Night. Parmenides leaves us a clue to this puzzle in the Way of Truth. There Parmenides argues that reality is a well-rounded sphere, since it is held within limits equally on all sides. Unlike Xenophanes, who claimed that the totality had no limits, Parmenides finds it inconceivable that the distance to which things extend should actually be indefinite. This is the same inconceivability we must deal with if we imagine what is to be of an indefinite kind. We simply cannot speak of the indefinite, whether it be an indefinite kind, or an indefinite distance. If we speak or think of it, it must be defined for us. So what is extends in each direction some definite distance, that far and no further, and since there is no reason why it should extend in one direction any farther than in any other, it extends equally far in all directions, and so is a sphere. Theophrastus takes this absolute limit how far we can go in any given direction to indicate that we run up against something solid, an outer sphere, that prevents further progress. Once more we run into a piece of radical contingency like that which governs the number and natures of the distinct sorts of being there are. The cosmos must be of some radius, but it is not necessarily of any particular radius. So perhaps it is necessarily the case that there is some contingent bar to further progress outwards, and this would be a solid, impenetrable sphere limiting all things. What about the solid body at the center? Well, similarly, it would be impossible to penetrate inwards indefinitely close to the center, so one might imagine a solid body of some definite radius, preventing any further inward motion there. This smallest possible radius, just like the largest possible, would be something that cannot be known through demonstrative argument.

One might have thought Parmenides and those who followed him closely, such as Empedocles, would have abandoned the scheme of the Ionians, in which the world is driven by the conflict of opposites. Such a conflict makes it just too easy to take one opposite as the absence of the other. But in fact the conflict of opposites remained basic in everyone’s thinking. Empedocles ameliorates the situation a bit by introducing four elementary stuffs, but the four seem to be defined, as is amply apparent in Aristotle’s form of the Empedoclean doctrine, in terms of opposites, the wet and the dry, the hot and the cold. Perhaps, if we assume that whatever stuffs we introduce are capable of degrees of mixture, this cannot be avoided, and is no problem. If one stuff is A, and the other B, we will immediately generate a range of possibilities, from pure A to pure B, with every degree of A and B between, pure B having a zero presence of A, and pure A a zero presence of B. Perhaps one of the two, A, let us say, is detectable by one of the senses, while the other is not. So Light is detectable by sight (the eyes contain some portion of Light, perhaps), but Night only by touch, which cannot, in its turn, detect Light, for it is the function of body, which is what Night is, to touch. From the standpoint of sight, then (which is due to Light’s recognition of Light), Night is nothing, and from the standpoint of touch (which is due to Night’s recognition of Night), Light is nothing. Light is presumably the purest of fire, while air, mist, and water are mixtures of light and night. So human beings tend to a certain illusion, that one of these is the mere absence of the other, due to reliance on the senses.

We have a fragment from Theophrastus’s On the Senses which, working within the framework of the Way of Opinion, states that everything that exists has some measure of knowledge. Even corpses, which are not, perceive what is not, that is, cold, silence, and darkness. What is, the Light or, as Theophrastus reports it, Fire, perceives what is, and we apparently perceive the world we do because we are a mixture of Light and Darkness. If there is more of light in us, we perceive more of what is, and if more of darkness, more of what is not. One should read this as a development of Ionian notions about knowledge, knowledge of like by like, as Theophrastus puts it. That is, we know whatever is made of the same stuff we are, as Anaximenes and Heraclitus held. Moreover, it is tempting to develop an account of Parmenides’s views concerning the survival and salvation of a person after death, if we may speak in such terms, modeled on Heraclitus. What is needed is for us to realize our identity with what is, Light or Fire, and upon death, the Fire in us unites with the Fire surrounding the world, becoming pure, and experiencing the unchanging awareness of what is, characteristic of the highest mystical experience of reality itself. If it is right to attribute such a view to Parmenides, it is further developed in Neoplatonic thought.

It seems to have been the opinion of Theophrastus, and indeed of Aristotle before him, that the Way of Opinion was presented by Parmenides as a stopgap which in fact contained a fatal logical flaw. It takes Light, as reality, and treats Night as the mere absence of light, as non-being, a thing without any positive qualities of its own to define it. This is wrong, but there are some difficult passages in Parmenides which might suggest it. What Parmenides probably intended was that we are tempted to identify the dead with those who are not, death being a matter of the Light’s being separated from the Night which composes our earthy bodies. So it need only be supposed that our true, perceiving selves are Light, not that Night is in fact a mere absence of Light. We might then be tempted to say that after death, what is not (not us), that is, the no longer animated body, perceives things like it, other portions of Night, which will thus be what is not (not us). Whatever leads us to suppose that Light is what is, and Night is what is not would introduce incoherence into our thoughts about the world, for each must be what it is in its own right. So mortals in particular, those subject to death, have a source of confusion here that others might not have. They project, as it were, their own subjective view of death, rooted in their identification of themselves with Light, onto the world, and so see body or Darkness as what is not, rather than merely another kind of what is. But in death nothing ceases to be—it is only that two realities are separated from one another. Parmenides in fact speaks in the surviving fragments of his poetry of mortals wandering about, dazed and confused, taking what is not to be and the like, because they rely on their senses. But all this we have explained, while supposing that Parmenides meant the Way of Opinion seriously, not as an account of how things had to be, but as an account how they might be, something like the truth.

Later, Plato would identify Light with the Forms, which have real being since they really are what they are entirely, and Night with matter or the receptacle that receives the forms, and whose only being is the potential it has to receive the forms. He would also identify our true selves as akin to the Forms, and see death as a separation of the true self from the body. But even if he is at one with Parmenides on these latter issues, there is no indication that Parmenides had conceived matter as a receptacle for light. He thinks he has to identify Night as something actual with its own nature, independent of the nature of Light, and seems to take both these things as a kind of stuff. Could its nature genuinely be independent if its presence rules out the presence of Light? Perhaps Parmenides thought we were unable to identify two different sorts of stuff without making them opposites that rule each other out, and saw the potential for misunderstanding here, but thought there was no other way to proceed. As worked out here, it looks like Parmenides might have thought that there were no insuperable contradictions or difficulties in the resulting world picture. Empedocles makes a valiant attempt to give an independent positive content to the natures of each of his four elements, though he does not seem quite to get away from the Pythagorean dualities, but only adopts them in a more complex form in his four-fold scheme of elements. Anaxagoras we might see as taking a different tack, insisting that no two sorts of stuff were opposites in the sense that they could not coexist together in the same place, though it might be that the perception of one ruled out the perception of the other. Plato’s theory of matter and the Forms, then, would suggest another solution, a solution that could be demonstrated to be true. He thought a good deal more could be known as necessary truth than did Parmenides, but Plato was right when he spoke of Parmenides in the Sophist as “father Parmenides,” the one who first raised the issue how what is not can be, and first saw the distinction between necessary and contingent truths. It is fair to say that Parmenides invented metaphysics.

3. EMPEDOCLES

Of all mortal things none has birth nor any ends in

accursed death, but only mingling and interchange of what

is mingled—birth is the name given these by men.

Empedocles, Fragment 8.

The poems of Empedocles (ca. 495 - ca. 435), On Nature and Purifications, were written in dactylic hexameters suggesting their divine inspiration and serious religious intent. Later accounts of Empedocles’s life are dominated by hostile tales based on his claim to be a fallen god, and tell us little about him. He probably made a living as a physician and a teacher of rhetoric. He seems also to have pursued democratic politics, and, as a result, to have become, in his later years, an exile from his native Acragas (now Agrigento) in Southern Sicily. We will examine first the more philosophical and scientific sides of his work, and then look at its religious import.

Empedocles followed Parmenides in all essentials, rejecting any reference to what is not, taking this to entail the rejection of the void and any variation in the density of what is, and holding that every characteristic of anything that is is an essential characteristic, so that a given sort of stuff cannot take on different qualities. He also insists that the senses inform us reliably of variations in the qualities of what is, so that earth, aither, fire, and water, the four roots of all things, can all be distinguished from one another through their essential sensible qualities. These four are beginningless, indestructible, and equally balanced in power and quantity. As in Parmenides, all other sorts of stuff arise as mixtures, and everything found in the world is structured from them. The creation and destruction of everything else that may seem to be is nothing more than the mingling of these four and their subsequent separation. Only the four elements really are, and all the rest are but temporary situations involving the elements, not things strictly so-called. Thus Empedocles takes the four world-masses of the Ionians and revises them to meet Parmenidean requirements.

Parmenides had rejected the possibility of a void, and so Empedocles argued for the possibility of motion even if there is no empty space and no possibility of fitting more into a given space through compression of what is already there. Movement can still take place as long as a circulation of material occurs in such a way that all available space remains equally full at every stage. Considering why motion actually occurs, Empedocles introduces two new elements into his picture of the world to establish the cause, Love and Strife. Love and Strife, though they have location, are not intended to be fifth and sixth material elements. Like Pythagorean Ones, and Parmenidean reality, they are known, not through the senses, but only by the mind. They have location, it seems, only in virtue of their influence on earth, air, fire and water. Strife, one could argue, had been with us all along in the Ionian systems, or at least in Heraclitus. Empedocles thought that a second principle of action had to be introduced because if strife ruled the four elements always, then they would, under its influence, eventually separate from one another completely, forming concentric spherical layers of fire, earth, water, an aither. After that, no further change would take place. Perhaps such an outcome could be avoided as long as the elements can transform one into another, as Heraclitus would have it, and the struggle between elements was a matter of each trying to alter the others into itself, but that view of Strife had to be given up under the pressure of Parmenides’s attacks. In Empedocles’s system, no element can be changed from what it is, and so Strife has to operate solely by moving things around. Thus he interpreted Strife as the tendency of the elements to avoid one another and associate only with their like, and, on that conception, if Strife alone ruled, complete separation and immobility must eventually ensue.

So Empedocles postulated not only Strife, but Love, which encourages the elements to mix with one another, the two working together to produce a repeated cycle of events. When Strife dominates, the four elements are separated into concentric shells, but then Love begins to move into the sphere, and to mix the elements together, until finally Love dominates entirely, producing a static, even-handed mixture something like Anaximander’s Unlimited. This mixture gives way to increased separation into lumps of a single element as Strife enters, and these lumps come together in a whirlpool to form the concentric shells once more. The present period, it seems, is one in which Strife has separated out the elements into shells, but Love is entering on the scene once more. Thus the gross structure of things is due to the action of strife, but there has been something of a breaking up and mixture of the elements, and biological beings can be found at the surface of the earth, where the elements are most mixed together. Love and Strife act like Anaximandrean opposites. Each strives against the other, and, since they are both immortal and equally matched, the result is an unending see-saw of dominance by one and then the other.

Empedocles held that each sort of stuff, whether it be bone, wine, blood, or whatever, could be defined as a mixture of the four elements in a definite proportion. An actual piece of bone, for instance, would consist of many very small nuggets made up of the four elements in the suitable proportions. These nuggets don’t break up in any ordinary physical process, but only when bone was transformed somehow into another substance. Each nugget was made up of smaller pellets consisting of a single element, there being a smallest size that a portion of a given element can attain to. Thus complete mixture of the elements with one another is never attainable, even at the height of Love’s rule. We can imagine the elements being divided progressively into smaller chunks, but, of course, an infinite number of divisions cannot occur (particularly in the restricted time that Love maintains control before Strife reenters the sphere), and at the end of it all uniform chunks of a certain size must still remain. So much we might learn from Zeno. Thus it is quite impossible for love to dominate absolutely, and since the four elements remain within the world, all that Strife can do is to produce a world in which they are distributed in just four masses, arranged in concentric spheres. It cannot break off contact between them entirely, and so it is also quite impossible for Strife to dominate absolutely.

It is Love that binds the elemental pellets together into the larger nugget. Empedocles thus postulated an analogue of our modern molecules, which break down only in chemical changes. In ordinary physical processes, in which substances move around, but are not altered, his explanations usually depended on references to “channels.” The molecules of a given substance show more or less attraction to one another, so that they could separate a greater or lesser distance from one another, and still hang together in a single mass. Moreover, they might align together, as in a crystal, or form a disorderly jumble, as in a piece of earth. So if a stream of fire particles, that is, a beam of light, were to strike the right sort of stuff, say water, or glass, it might slip easily between the molecules in it and pass out the other side without breaking the stuff up, if fairly wide channels are easily formed. Or, it might find no ready passages at all if it would be required to break the stuff apart to get through it, and be reflected, or it might penetrate a little way in before getting stuck. In such cases we would have ordinary, opaque materials. Very active fire might break the molecules apart from one another, in the way that a strong stream of water scatters gravel, and so cause water to boil, or even bring about chemical change by penetrating into the molecules themselves and breaking them apart, as when wood burns. Fire is the active element, the one responsible for most of the changes that occur in the world, and the Sun drives most natural processes.

The Empedoclean world-cycle retains elements of Pythagorean cosmogony. If we start with Love dominant in the perfectly mixed sphere, which Empedocles calls the One, we find Strife on the outside of the One, and then, like the Pythagorean unlimited entering the limited, Strife begins to enter the One and break it up. It does this by causing each of the elements to separate from what is unlike it and aggregate to its like. A gradually increasing whirling motion results, beginning at the center and expanding outwards, and the heavier elements settle to the center, as in a whirlpool (so here he follows the Ionian model). Eventually the elements are entirely separated into layers, with earth at the center. Then Love, pushed out of the Cosmos as far as it can be, begins to reenter, once more at the center, and its influence increases until all is blended perfectly and a single living being, a god embracing the whole world, is established. Then the cycle resumes, as strife enters once more at the center, “shaking the God in all his limbs.”

At present we are in the period of increasing strife. First aither (that is, what we might call air) separated out as an outer sphere, and then fire, which is heavier, separated out below it. The fire caused the outer aither to become crystalline, baking it, and left pockets of fire embedded in it, the stars. It then pooled at the bottom, forming the sun, and in doing so, set the whole system of crystalline spheres that had formed into revolution. The revolution will go faster and faster, contributing to the separation of the four elements. At the center there is also fire, which is observable in the volcanic activity, hot springs, and the like so prevalent in Sicily. The fire in the center does not separate out at first because the rotation is not fast enough there. Things move faster on the edge of the rotating mass, and so the separation begins there, and then gradually moves inward. Water is gradually being squeezed out of the earth, and the fire is gradually finding its way into the sphere below the aither. (Aer, at this time, is still conceived as a form of water—as mist and fog. Our air is the lower reaches of aither.) Living things arose when fire trapped below the earth forced its way out, leaving in its path mixtures of the elements like that in the God. Various tissues form, blood, flesh, bone, and so on, and these combine together in various ways, those combinations that happen to be well adapted for survival continuing and reproducing, while the others perish. Empedocles, like the later Atomists, sought out mechanical explanations even in the realm of biology, and though Love seems to serve as the principle of organization in living things, it performs its feats of organization through mechanical processes.

The Italian, Pythagorean-Orphic complex of religious belief we have already observed in Italy has another representative here in Empedocles, with his doctrines of reincarnation and our origins in a fallen divinity to which we can hope to be reunited. Strife is a force for evil, and Love for the good. The dominance of Love is prepared by creatures’ atonement for their sins under Strife, for the fallen gods who trusted themselves to Strife must endure many lives as plants and animals, and only with the progress of evolution are they later born as men, and then prophets, physicians, poets and princes among men. In the end, it seems, all merge together into the One, only to split apart again under Strife in the next cycle. The soul itself can be nothing but a parcel of Love (and so immaterial), which endures repeated incarnations until it merges once more with the whole. The gods, in this scheme, seem to be individual portions of Love strongly enough under the influence of Strife to be separate individuals, but not so strongly under the influence of Strife so that they are in harmful competition with one another.

Empedocles makes Love responsible for knowledge. He follows Parmenides in the usual Ionian