«Night and Day,...» Parmenides 2

Seth Benardete

Night and day,... : ParmenidesIn: Mtis. Anthropologie des mondes grecs anciens. Volume 13, 1998. pp. 193-225.

RsumNight and day, ...: Parmenides (pp. 193-225) partir du paradoxe inhrent la qute de soi-mme dans la posie de Parmnide - suivre les paroles de la desse, tredivinement guid ou rechercher la voie de la vrit - l'auteur dveloppe tout particulirement une rflexion sur le chemin de ladesse.

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Benardete Seth. Night and day,.. : Parmenides. In: Mtis. Anthropologie des mondes grecs anciens. Volume 13, 1998. pp.193-225.

doi : 10.3406/metis.1998.1082

http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/metis_1105-2201_1998_num_13_1_1082

NIGHT AND DAY, ...: PARMENIDES1

Parmenides was not unaware that he himself had corne into being, and that when he spoke of the one of being

he had two feet. (Simplicius)

Socrates found in him a noble depth, which filled him with as much shame and fear as Helen had once felt before Priam; but his speeches baffled him and thwarted his efforts to understand his thought2. The construal of Parmenides' words still divides his readers, and the thought behind his words is as dark as ever. It is not, then, wholly due to the fragmentary vidence we now hve that puts us in the same position as Socrates. Parmenides' teaching on being is as compelling as it is impossible, for the goddess tells Parmenides the truth while denying that he exists. The setting for the truth about Truth and Opinion is more fantastic than Opinion itself: nonbeing bridges the divide between Truth and Opinion. If it is allegory that frames the literal truth about Truth and Opinion, it cannot but inform that truth and infect it: Justice puts being on trial (8. 14-15). The goddess tells Parmenides that according to opinion mind is merely the disposition of the body (16), and consequently he cannot possibly think that which is (6. 6). Either there is nothing but body, or there is nothing but mind, and as the latter suits mortals and the former immortals, the goddess can no more report on Opinion than Parmenides can convey Truth to us. Parmenides puts together what he

1. The fragments are numbered in accordance with the fifth dition of Diels-Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, but the text is often not theirs but those of the more modem ditions: Leonardo Tarn, Parmenides, Princeton, 1965; David Gallop, Parmenides of Elea, Toronto, 1984; A. H. Coxon, The Fragments of Parmenides, Assen/ Maastricht, 1986. Citations in the text refer to the fragments of Parmenides; but the testimonia are cited from Coxon's dition with a before the number and Coxon after it.

2. Theaetetus, 183 e 3-184 a 3.

194 SETH BENARDETE

breaks apart; but the break is an opration of thought, and the putting together just patchwork. The necessary apartness of reflection hides behind the impossible togetherness of poetic production.

Three things are conspicuously absent from Parmenides' poem, and a fourth is just as surprising for its prsence. The goddess never ascribes eternity () to being or falsehood () to nonbeing; nonbeing disappears as soon as the goddess turns to Opinion, even though 'to be not' is as much a mortal name as 'to be' (8. 40), and the goddess promises that Parmenides will know (, [10. 1, 5]) and learn ( [8.31]) mortal opinions, but she herself never uses such verbs about Truth. Parmenides is, to be sure, fated to hear of everything ( ) (. 28), but only he says that he was on a road that carries the man who knows ( ) (1. 3). The goddess says that mortals know nothing ) (6. 4). That the goddess never speaks of the parts that should presumably constitute the whole of being might be thought a fifth cause of astonishment, but not if 'whole' means no more than One', and the likeness of being to a sphre does not grant it anything more than arbitrarily sliced homogeneous sections, and the diffrence between the surface and center of a sphre fails to apply to being. If being is also bereft of any magnitude, despite the equal measures the goddess assigns to it (8. 44, 49), being is no more than a point and as hypothetical as any other gomtrie entity. It is one thing for the goddess to speak of an articulated order () of opinions no less plausible () than imagistic () (8. 60); it is quite another for being to transgress its own boundaries through an image3. Dception ( ) should be an exclusive property of Opinion (8. 32). Plato's Eleatic Stranger, in believing that Parmenides' whole case collapses if phantom speeches ( ) and the arts that produce them can be shown to exist, seems to be unaware that Parmenides had anticipated his counter-proof in the phantom speech his own poem was, despite the fact that the lines he himself quotes from it lodged the image within the account of being4. The patricide he is about to commit and for which he asks Theaetetus's pardon is itself a phantom5.

Before one attributes a radical skepticism to Parmenides, into which he has fallen through his own invention, one should first consider how Plato

3. The double meaning of , which controls the account that Timaeus gives, first shows up in the Odyssey, where Nestor, in speaking of Telemachus, juxtaposes its two senss: f) , / (Odyssey, 3. 124-5).

4. Sophist, 241 d 10-e 6; 244 e 2-7. 5. Sophist, 241 d 3-242 a 4.

NlGHTAND DAY, ...: PARMENIDES 195

implicates both Parmenides and the Eleatic Stranger in the representational problem that Parmenides' poem posed. The Eleatic Stranger 's own procdure in the Sophist in volves him in the deceptiveness of even before he calls Theaetetus's attention to its diffrence from and expresses his puzzlement as to which art suits the sophist 's6. His classification of the sophist transforms the sophist into a hunter and himself into his hunter. He conceals himself in tracking down him who conceals himself. He turns the sophist into a projection of his own imagemaking, through which he intends to put an end to his elusiveness, and simultaneously projects himself into the same image without acknowledging that he has contaminated the truth about the sophist with his own kind of making long before he pulls the mask off and reveals that the acquisitor-sophist- philosopher is after ail the maker-sophist-philosopher. The Eleatic Stranger thus traps himself along with Parmenides and seems to indicate that Parmenidean poetry was not an embellishment on thought but a necessity for thought. The poetry of the imagination had to write up the prose of reason. In the Parmenides Plato has Parmenides exercise the gymnastic of thought on his own thesis about the one. He argues that every hypothesis has to be tested in four ways, and another four if the hypothesis does not hold7. The eighth hypothesis, however, is not an hypothesis at ail, for Parmenides uses two examples to illustrate it, and in accordance with their hypothetical character there are no examples anywhere else8. The eighth hypothesis is supposedly, If the one is not, and Parmenides asks what happens to everything else in relation to the nonbeing of the one. The exprience of dreams and the existence of the art of show that even if the one is, both of thse examples still are and do not vanish with the dniai of the hypothesis. No matter what sens is given to the one, it will still be the case that there are some things that both experientially and rationally escape from its dominion. Not everything is a dduction from the one. It follows, moreover, since dreaming illustrtes the sudden () changes of shapes9, that the hypothesis Parmenides speaks of third is not entirely hypothetical either: the sudden, which does not occur in any other hypothesis but the third and eighth, does not dpend on whether the second hypothesis holds or not. The sudden has its experiential vindication unconditionally. Plato, then, twice indicates that far from correcting Parmenides he is belatedly coming to understand his speeches and catch up with his thought.

6. Cf. Sophist, 223 c 2-4; 224 e 6-7. 7. Parmenides, 136 a-b 4. 8. Parmenides, 164 d 2-4; 165 c 7-8. 9. Parmenides, 164 d 3.

196 SETH BENARDETE

Parmenides' poem seems to divide readily enough into narrative and speech; and it is easy to forget that there is a silent logos of the whole that comprehends Parmenides' narrative and the goddess's speech: the speech of the goddess is a speech of Parmenides too. The three parts of the poem are the proem, which divides into three subsections, the speech of Truth, and the speech of Opinion10. The first subsection of the proem consists of Parmenides' report of his journey into the light (1-10)", the second of the obstacle Justice put in his path and the service the daughters of the sun rendered him in getting Justice to open the gtes of the house of Night for them (11-21), and the third reports the welcome he received from an anonymous goddess and her promise of a comprehensive report on Truth and Opinion (22-32). Between the deed of Parmenides' journey and the speech of the goddess, in each of which Parmenides seems not to hve omitted anything, there is another speech that Parmenides fails to give us: the soft speeches with which the Heliades persuaded the goddess of severe punishment to let Parmenides through. Between a deed and a speech was a speech designed to initiate a deed. The deed was the letting in of light into the house of Night: Justice was to open the gtes for them (), not for Parmenides (*). If it had been for Parmenides, we would hve thought that Parmenides was to become a god (so far off was he from the track of human beings [1. 27]), and the soft speeches ( ) to which Justice succumbed were meant to recall the soft and beguiling speeches (- ) with which Calypso tried in vain to enchant Odysseus and make him deathless and ageless'2. But as it is, what connects Parmenides, who starts out in some undefined place, with a goddess who is the mouthpiece for the heart of perfectly circular Truth, are speeches that must hve shaded the Truth somewhat if Justice were willing to cease to be punitive for a moment and not keep a mortal confined to opinion. Not fully rational speech opened the way to reason. The privilge extended to Parmenides does not spread automatically to ail mortals (1. 27). We follow Parmenides through the gtes without knowing how we did it, and without the formula for turning the keys of , we cannot on our own duplicate Parmenides' way. The chariot Parmenides was on was built for one passenger; we must hve been left behind at the start and only through self-

10. The latter dsignation is misleading: the goddess always speaks of opinions in the plural (1. 30-1; 8. 51). Opinions are not subject to unification (cf. 8. 54). They are always ofmortals; Truth is not of anyone.

1 1. D. Gallop's repunctuation, so that goes with , does not solve the problem of why Parmenides needed sunlight to go into the house of Night.

12. Odyssey, 1.56-7.

NIGHTAND DAY, ...: PARMENIDES 197

delusion followed in the train of Parmenides. The structure of Opinion concides exactly with the lments in Parmenides' proem, but it does not correspond to any known thesis of another philosopher, and it certainly seems not to characterize ail opinion. By the end of the poem Parmenides returns to his own opinions, but we were taken for a ride: we cannot tell apart the truth, which is on the way of Conviction () (2. 10), from the conviction mortals hve settled into that the names of Opinion are true (- ) (8. 39). ' be' is as prvalent on the one side as on the other.

One's first impression, when one reads that the goddess can begin anywhere and return to where she started, is that she refers exclusively to the heart of well-rounded Truth, and it would make no diffrence where she began her exposition of it (5). It is indiffrent () because it is fully rational ( )'3. The finitude of being could as easily prcde its immobility as the other way around (8. 42-49; 8. 26-33). The goddess does stop after Truth (8. 50), but she does not interrupt her speech. She seems to imply that she could hve started with Opinion and then gone on to Truth; but one does not see how her cosmology could hve led to Truth had she not pointed out where nonbeing lurked in her account, which in the arrangement we now hve is an easy inference from the oneness of being. If, moreover, one goes back to the manuscripts, as ail rcent editors do, the road on which the mares put Parmenides was the road of the goddess herself (v [1. 2-3], ' ) [1. 27]) and thus extended from the beginning of the journey to the end. Justice guards a single road the gtes of which separate day from night. Parmenides, then, was always on the way even before he met the goddess. Truth does not begin on the other side of the gtes, but the way of Opinion, if not of nonbeing as well, was always intertwined with Truth. Parmenides, however, was not always on the way. He had to be put there (' ). Where was he before? The way must lie through () opinions and eut across () opinions. Before he was put on the way, he must hve wandered without a way: wandering is characteristic of mortals (6. 5). The way is ; it is a way of much talk, many rumors, and widespread ( ' [1.3]) opinions. Parmenides tells us that he started on the way but not where, and if he repeated his journey, as the density of imperfects in the first subsection implies, there is no reason to believe that he always began at the same place. There was a

13. One may compare with this possibility Socrates' account of the mind's self- enclosed course: it starts out from a nonhypothetical principle, employs nothing pesceptible, proceeds from ideas through ideas to ideas, and finishes with ideas (Republic, 521b3-c2).

198 SETH BENARDETE

variety of opinions before and after his enlightenment. He did not necessarily get to know anything or understand anything about the way of Truth once the goddess informed him about Truth; otherwise he would hve had no need to renew his journey. His way is like every other mortaPs: it is and turns back on itself (6. 9).

The comprehensive account of Truth and Opinion that the goddess promises soon undergoes a split between two ways, both of which are ways of noetic conception (), but one of which is impossible for Parmenides either to recognize () himself or point out to another () (2). A way that is not a way seems to be -, for one does not meet with an unless one is already underway. An is not exactly the same as no throughway. Justice, after ail, blocked the way, but Parmenides still got through. Parmenides, however, did not proceed on his way, for the way he was taking seems to be resumed in the cosmology of the third part only after an interruption. Without the digression into truth, which is at some immeasurably great distance from his original way, Parmenides would hve gone from the exprience of light and night to an account of his exprience, so that knowledge would prove to be a natural extension of exprience, without a break and without a reorientation. He would hve thought that the two highest principles of ail things show themselves directly for what they are at the beginning: as principle and as beginning would hve been one. The goddess stood in the way of Parmenides' perfect return. Without the obstacle Justice put in his way, the goddess would never hve spoken to him. She put a spoke in the circularity of Parmenides' pre- Parmenidean thought. In revealing to him the problem of being, she let Parmenides corne to recognize that ail cosmology is hypothetical, and its principles are less trustworthy than the not true trust with which he began (1. 30). Parmenides did not say where he began because, no matter how often he renewed the journey, there never was any certain beginning. He always started with not true trust.

Parmenides' journey begins with seventeen verbs of motion14; but as soon as the daughters of the sun push away their veils, he encounters a place where there are () the gtes of the ways of day and night. Being puts an end to motion, and Parmenides never goes forward again with any unambiguous word of motion: ' (1. 21). At the same time that being shows up, aorists become more frquent, and whatever motion there is concerns the opening of the gtes and the

14. (1, 3, 4bis), (1), (2, 8), (2), (2), - (5), (5), (7), (8), (9), (10).


rvolution of pivots in the door posts. The second subsection seems much less original than the first. It echoes Hesiod's description of the house in which Day and Night are never together but always pass one another on their way in or out15. No sooner does Parmenides stop than he confronts the mythical along with being. He passes into the poetic tradition and hints at how 'to be' appears in its conventional form. The daughters of the sun are no doubt as imaginary as Justice, but it is far easier to strip them of their mythical garb than to refashion the punitiveness of Justice and rid the house of night of its lintel and threshold. Sextus Empiricus allegorizes the mares, the wheels, and the Heliades far more plausibly than he does Justice, whom he identifies with , with its secure apprhension of things (7. 113), but he fails to explain why the eyes should hve to persuade thought to let them through rather than the other way around. Indeed, what one misses exactly at this point is the act of thought that would realize that day and night are one. If the goddess made good on her promise to account for the invisible deeds (' ) of the sun (10. 3), then Parmenides came to know simultaneously that the ways of day and night are the one way of a single day, and that this insight dpends on a constructed model of the sky, sun, and earth. As a measure of time, the day of day and night neither shines nor fails to shine: mind alone can comprehend this day, for it is a kind of one'6. Parmenides seems to go from perception to intellection without going through the mathematical modelmaking of , only to get back to perception, once intellection is ver and done with, through . It must hve been in the third part that the goddess told Parmenides that the morning star and the evening star were one (T 65, 123 Coxon). Does the goddess mean, then, after ail, that the third part could hve been after the first, and in a manner reminiscent of Plato's divided line Parmenides could hve gone from to and from there to , and only then would we understand why Parmenides placed ail three in the rgion of ? Parmenides could thus hve avoided the abruptness of the transition from the first part to the second, but would we hve been any better off? The first part looks at any rate as if it combines the divided line's with the image of the Cave'7, where Justice at the gtes would stand for the threat the

15. Theogony, 746-754. 16. If the stone threshold and lintel (1 . 12) represent respectively earth and heaven, then

Parmenides has consistently ighored the one of both in a cosmos, for their conceptualized unity is indispensable only for the hypothesis of the third part.

17. The Eleatic Stranger defines as a mixture of and (Sophist, 264 a 8-b 4). Although it might be as inadquate as Aristotle says it is (De anima, 428 a 24-428 b 9), it fits perfectly Parmenides' proem.

200 SETH BENARDETE

city always holds in reserve against the philosopher and his ascent18. Are we, then, those whom the Heliades persuade to release Parmenides into the boundless (' )?

The first word of the poem is horses; the second tells us that they are mares. Since many animais in Greek are by usage more often fminine than masculine, without necessarily being female, one cannot tell at first whether there is anything significant in the choice; but as soon as one reads further, and everything throughout the poem in which there is some suggestion of agency and life, is female - , , , , ', , ', (12. 3), (? 13) - Parmenides seems to hve surrounded himself with goddesses and implied that either no god came to help him or he had no need of any maie beside himself. The daughters of the sun are apart from their father. The first maie god and the first of gods to be devised was " (13); but Parmenides did not ascribe to him his own impulse, which the mares supported to the extent he wanted ( ' ), though he could hve inserted " into a passable enough phrase (e.g., ' ' []). Despite the co-presence of maie and female in Parmenides' journey, there is nothing erotic in their relation, nothing at any rate that would lead to gnration, even if the daughters of the sun push back their veils as brides do when they get married (1. 10), the goddess applies to Parmenides a word () that Euripides uses for a husband - it is more frquent of wives - and just as the Heliades are and Parmenides a (1. 5, 9, 21, 24), so girls () and boys () occur together in Plato to designate those of marriageable ge (cf. 17)i9. Plato's Phaedrus also makes us think along thse lines, for Socrates' myth dnies that eros and mind together can achieve a complte vision of the hyperuranian beings, while Parmenides asserts that he had gained repeated access to a rgion that seems to lie beyond the world of day and night. If dsire for the beautiful encapsultes the meaning of ", and fear is the fundamental exprience of , insofar as the just and the unjust equally fear her punishment and the just fear as well that she does not exist, then Parmenides found to be an obstacle to his will that aimed at something that was as perfect and complte as the beautiful is meant to be but offered no human reminder of it. Parmenides the man () saw nothing in the light () of day that attracted him20.

18. In the Republic, Polemarchus thwarts Socrates' attempt to go back to town by his refusai to listen if Socrates tries to persuade him (327 c 10-12). This irrational obstinacy initites the problem of justice.

19. Euripides, Orestes, 1136; Plato, Laws, 772 a 1. 20. Diels-Kranz point out that (14) is a playful allusion to Iliad, 5. 214

( ).

NIGHT AND DAY, ...: PARMENIDES 201

Everything on the journey takes place in haste. The mares strain, the axle glows hot, the wheels whirl, the girls rush to escort Parmenides and persuade Justice to open the gtes without delay. The meeting of Parmenides and the goddess is in time and under its constraints. He has to be on time. The fleeting frames the discovery of being and marks the falling together of mind and that which is. Parmenidean poetry has its natural ground in becoming and perishing and can grant Parmenides no more than a glimpse beyond the mortal21. The goddess speaks throughout of mortals () and mortal opinions ( ). Human beings are mortals. That they die is what they are. Through certainty in their mortality they understand themselves as the paradigm of nonbeing. For the goddess to imply that they are not merely confirms what they believe they already know: Oh gnrations of mortals, how I count you as the equal of gnrations that do not live at ail22. Tragic knowledge seems to be the ground for the Parmenidean paradox, and Justice the sign that this punitive understanding man has of himself stands in the way of philosophy. Death and Sleep dwell in the same house as Night and Day, according to Hesiod, and the sun never sees either of them in its ascent into or descent from the sky23. If Parmenides' poem begins and ends in opinion, it imittes the course of a single day and brings Parmenides back to the night from which he started out before he woke to a new understanding of how mortal and immortal fit together. That this new understanding, however, seems to be a matter of the will, a momentary reprieve, and must rely on persuasion to obtain it would indicate the degree to which the goddess's teaching apparently concides with mortal opinion.

The light into which the Heliades send Parmenides seemingly differs from the glowing heat of the axle ( ). Its glow is due to friction and has something in common with the where the gtes are (), which is common () to the world of Opinion (11.2), and characterizes one of the two shapes ( ) that are meant to account for ail of

21. Consider the lments that Parmenides' proem has in common with Pindar Olympian, 6. 22-29; mules (fminine) are said to know how to lead ( - ) on the road back to Hagesias' ancestors, and the gtes of song must be opened wide () for them, for Pindar must corne today to Pitana on time ( ). At this point Pitana becomes a woman. As space goes into time in Pindar, so Parmenides starts on a way that goes into time; as the mules know, so the mares are ; as there are gtes of songs, so there are gtes of the house of Night; as Pindar has to get to Pitana on time, so Parmenides' mares are straining; and as a place becomes a woman, so a place for becomes a .

22. Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, 1 186-88. It is possible to read (2. 5) as saying either, We are fated not to be, or, We must not be, i.e., suicide.

23. Theogony, 756-766.

202 SETH BENARDETE

becoming and perishing. Parmenides seems to pass from a terrestrial to a celestial journey instantaneously. He shifts abruptly from an enigmatic picture of his transport to a cosmology that through the ethereal gtes and stony threshold has him understand the deceitfulness of Opinion. Indeed, the break is so sharp that one is tempted to hve the second subsection antedate the first, so that the Heliades would first pick up Parmenides in the house of Night and not leave it until they had persuaded Justice to let them out, and not, as the squence now is, leave first () and then guide Parmenides straight back into the house of Night. Parmenides would then plunge into darkness, ne ver wake up, and hve no need of either intelligent mares or the guiding light of the sun. The noise of the axle, which Parmenides speaks of as a battle-cry (), and which arises from the dizzying () speed of the wheels in contact with the way of much talk, does seem to point to hearsay, as Sextus perhaps meant when he said the wheels stood for the ears, and indicate an opposition between what constitutes Parmenides' vehicle and what guides and leads it. Parmenides stands on hearsay while traveling toward the light. We do not know whether he ever descends from the chariot: a goddess could easily clasp his hand even if he never was on a level with her. The setting, then, for the report of the goddess on Truth is not Truth. Truth herself is silent; she has a heart but no tongue. The mouthpiece for Truth images Truth in the lment of Opinion. She is the intermediary between Truth and Parmenides, and however exact the correspondence may be between the goddess and Truth, Parmenides absorbs it in a setting that, as the goddess reveals in the third part, is hypothetical. The logos that translates the disclosure that is Truth undergoes in Parmenides' rception of it a further translation. Once he hears the myth () he is to take it home () (2. 2). The disclosure that is Truth (-) first shows up in a nonlogos form: (2. 3). The rest is interprtation.

The journeying of Parmenides is in time. To go beyond the gtes of day and night would mean to go beyond time. Justice does not stand permanently in the way of this possibility (1. 28). She punishes and holds the keys of retaliation (). go beyond time would not be to go beyond Justice. Justice is not hostile to atemporality: the trial () upon which everything dpends, whether being is or is not, has already been tried and settled () (8. 15-16)24. Justice establishes a pattern of right, and this

24. ' (8. 16) is not just resumptive or an emphatic connective, as Denniston says (Greek Particles, p. 463), but it has the sens proper to it of discarding as irrelevant the alternative the goddess has just proposed.


pattern of right drops the exprience that gave rise to the demand for right. The irreversibility of time necessarily turns right into a pattern of right. Cleon, in demanding that the Athenians not rescind the decree he proposed, the excution of ail Mytilenean maies above a certain ge, insists that this does not hve to be the case: Do not betray yourselves, but get as close as possible in your understanding ( ) to your exprience (), and think how you would hve put no price too high on their conquest; so now pay them back without any show of softness in light of the prsent moment and do not forget the danger that once hung over you25. Justice settles accounts and balances wrong against right, but she does not compensate for exprience. Justice thus seems to be the proper marker for the diffrence between the experiential intertwining of Truth and Opinion at the start of Parmenides' journey and the sharp sparation to which they submitted once he passed through the gtes of experiential time. Parmenides' repeated return to his exprience signifies his awareness that he must put back together the way that the way itself divides. His action shows the necessity he was under not to sunder the way he took from what he took home. Self-knowledge had to complment the insight into being and the knowledge of becoming26.

The axle () of Parmenides' chariot gave off the sound of a hollow pipe (). The two gtes when they were flung open turned on axles in hollows ( ). A schematic drawing of a chariot, with an axle, two wheels, and a platform, if turned ninety degrees, would depict as easily each half of the gtes Parmenides describes. The going thus becomes the obstacle27. What was a movement toward the light, once the girls pushed their veils away from their heads ( ) came to a hait before the door-bolt that Justice was to push away from the gtes ( ). The experiential unfolding of the world was enfolded into its nondisclosure. The rolling motion of the wheels morphed into a cosmic structure of apartness and sparation. A gte across the single way made it into the two ways () of day and night. Justice blocked

25.Thucydides,3.40. 7. 26. If is correctly restored at 6. 3, the goddess keeps Parmenides away from the

way of truth and the way of opinion. If there is no lacuna after 6. 3 (and does not look as if it can still be with ' if even a single line cornes between them), and the first way is not just being postponed, then there must be a third way that Parmenides is to take. This third way must be the way of the goddess on which he started out.

27. After the gtes swing open the way Parmenides is on becomes an or - - (1. 21), i.e., a way for a cart with two axles.

204 SETH BENARDETE

the ways. If the enfolding of the unfolding represents the truth of Parmenides' beginning, then the second subsection is truly first: Parmenides was of the opinion when he started out that he was without opinion. The going into the light was free of opinion. Either Justice did not stand in the way or Justice was at one with Truth. The unfalse () and true () Nereus, according to Hesiod, was unerring (), gentle, not forgetful ( ) of laws, and knew just and gentle thoughts28. Parmenides had to learn mortal opinions from the goddess; he did not know that he had opinions. He did not know about the harshness of Justice.

After the removal of the boit, the goddess informed Parmenides of the meaning of his way (1. 24-32). The way had a purpose and a goal right from the start; it was to comprehend everything of which he must be informed, both () the immobile heart of Truth and () the opinions of mortals; but the goddess then dclares there are only two ways of thought, and of thse one is blocked, and though the goddess points it out to Parmenides (xot ), Parmenides cannot point out ( ) that which is not (2. 2-8). We are given a problem in arithmetic: a one is a two; the two is one; but the one is once more a two, but there is only one and never was two (8. 1). The first part of the problem is easily soluble: the two of day and night is the one of day. The one of day, then, has its match in the one logos of Truth and Opinion; but the one of being does not admit the two of being and nonbeing. The one of being, however, is a singular kind of one. It consists of three lments: , v, . Thinking and being always belong together, but they are not identical: mind does not think itself. If thinking and being are two but never apart, they must be at a distance from one another. Parmenides represents this distance in a twofold way. It is the distance between Truth and the goddess, and the distance between the goddess and Parmenides. Parmenides and the goddess stand face to face, and the goddess grasps Parmenides' right hand with hers (1. 22-3). Since right is not right across from right, Parmenides is not looking at himself in a mirror. Her gesture tells him that she is going to be open with him and he has nothing to fear (1. 26)29; but he and the goddess can never be one. As the goddess () is the sighting () of Truth, so Truth is that which discloses

28. Theogony, 233-236. Consider Herodotus's juxtaposition of and (1. 96. 3-97. 1) of Deoces. In Old Persian art means both truth and right; cf. Herodotus, 1.138.1.

29. When Achilles has promised Priam to stop the war for as long as he requires, Achilles / , ' (Iliad, 24. 671-2). Meineke's (and Jaeger's) at 1. 3 would anticipate the goddess's assurance and set aside the significance of Justice standing in the way.


being to mind. Parmenides says nothing about the cause of Truth: what is it that opens the mind to being and transmits being to mind? The sun always shines but its deeds are at times not visible (). Its occlusions correspond not to the relation between Truth and the goddess but to that between the goddess and Parmenides. Man () is not always in the light ().

If the opinions of mortals can be understood, they cannot be grounded in nonbeing; but neither can it be the case that one could eut each opinion off from its truthful part and then know and point to nonbeing by itself. Day is not truth and night nonbeing. Day and night in their togetherness but apartness from the one of day are the paradigm of opinions; but it is more vident how to unit day and night into one than how opinions fit into the one of truth. Opinion does not simply part truth from truth but fragments and scatters it without order (cf. 4). According to the goddess, Parmenides will learn how fated it was () that opinions ( ), in passing entirely through everything, be entirely acceptable () (1. 31-2). Opinions were fated to be genuine and unfeigned30. The kindly acceptance () the goddess showed Parmenides has its match in the acceptance of opinions (1. 22). The apparent identity of the first syllable in and , as if they had the same root, signifies how the speeches of opinion look the same as the speeches of truth. It is not just 'to be' that shows up in each, but 'mind' (16. 2; 6. 6), 'thought' () (16. 4), 'the same' () (8. 56), 'fuir () (9. 3), 'ail' () (9. 3), 'together' () (9. 3), 'now' () (19.1), 'signs' () (8. 55* 10. 2), 'in itself (' ) (8.58), 'equal' () (9.4), 'limit' () (10. 7), and 'middle' () (12. 3). This isomorphism was as fated as the fate () of (6. 1). If the goddess's is not a counterfactual, and she does not intend to explain why opinion should hve penetrated everywhere but did not, she confirms her main thesis and ruins it, for Truth never did get through anywhere, and Parmenides journeyed only to and from opinion and never was diverted into Truth. He would be back with Xenophanes: Even if in the best possible case one should speak what is complte and perfect, ail the same one does not know it oneself: Opinion () has been made over ail31.

The goddess is (), Parmenides you () (2. 1). They are two. Parmenides himself is another I, who reports the speech of the goddess.

30. The Chorus of Persians speak of their own grief for the dead as (Aeschylus, Persae, 546-7). Their song of ritual grief is from the heart.

31. Xenophanes, fragment 34. 4-5.

206 SETH BENARDETE

There are two I's and one you. One I is the same as you, but the other I is never either you or the other I. One you and I are one, the other you and I are never we. Parmenides is coupled () with the Heliades, never with the goddess. They are apart even when face to face. Their apartness seems to be the significance of the two ways of inquiry (), on one of which the goddess is, and on the other of which Parmenides goes but does not know it and cannot point it out (2. 2-8). Each way has two signs. One sign on each way is not a logos, is and is not; but the other signs are speeches, Nonbeing is not and Nonbeing must be. Of the two speeches, only that on the second way tells us something we believed we did not know. It says there is a necessity for nonbeing to be. It implies that its counter-speech means Nonbeing is impossible. Is, then, would mean is necessary (8. 11); but never means according to the speech of mortals is necessary; but it often means is possible. Opinion dclares that to be means to be possible and nothing is necessary. That mortals hypothesize () to be and to be not necessarily carries with it this double implication (8. 39-40). Nothing is necessary means not only that there is no necessary being - Chaos, according to Hesiod, came first into being through nothing and out of nothing - but accordingly the possibility of there being nothing is necessary. The goddess asserts on the contrary that it is impossible for nothing to be necessary.

Lucretius says that to be means to be body, and the only things that are are body and void (1. 418-420). Void is nonbeing, but if it were not, bodies would not be able to move. In order to hve a world Lucretius must sacrifice the cohrence of his principle. Self-contradiction is the price to be paid for the power of explanation. No matter how many thories fall into the Lucretian dilemma they cannot settle the issue whether this must always be the case and ail theory, as Parmenides' goddess seems to imply, cannot consistently ground itself, if there can be nothing in common between what is and what must be. Democritus and Leucippus boldly declared that void was nonbeing, and that which is is no more than that which is not32. Parmenides, however, cannot just mean by what can be inferred from the way not to be taken, for the necessity of necessary being must include the necessity of contingent being as well if the goddess is to speak before if not with Parmenides. If necessary being hogs ail of being to itself as much as Lucretian body does, then Parmenides is stuck even deeper, if it is possible to say so, in the same difficulty as Lucretius. No dismantling of the goddess as mre fiction, as pure nonbeing, is going to extricate Parmenides from the impossible. If the logos is his alone it is not.

32. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 985 b 4-10.


In the second fragment, there are, in addition to the four of the two ways, the of the two ways (2. 2), the of the way of Persuasion (2. 4), the of the second way () (2. 6), and (2. 7). The being of the two ways divides into the being of the way of Persuasion and the being of the way that is either utterly inscrutable () or utterly unpersuasive (), and this latter way is of that which is not. The way not to be taken is prosaic, and an argument is laid out; but the true way is poetic and no argument is given. It is as if the way of Persuasion were a projection of the impassable way and the essence of opinion in its inversion. Truth is imagistic, opinion is not; it is represented as it really is in its being , so that it appears as the real, while the truth appears as the of opinion. To strip Truth of its would be to assign the appropriate image to opinion as well. This seems to be the function the third part fulfills: the goddess offers there an (8. 60). According to Menander Rhetor, the third part also gave an allegorical account of the Olympian gods (T 151-2 Coxon). 'Persuasion' and 'Truth' should hve been among their new names.

A being whose essence is nonbeing, and who believes he is the source of ail ngation, and there is no restriction on his negativity, is told that being does impose a restriction on his capacity to negate everything and anything, for it is not just nonbeing that lies within the rgion of thought. Being too can only be thought. Not only can it be thought, but it must be thought. is not a transitive verb that can pick up anything to think. It therefore does not hve a logos-structure. Through the sameness of and that of which is (8. 34), ov is the cognate accusative of . If one thinks, one thinks being. Were this not the case, would act as an agent power and alter by its agency whatever it thinks. Likewise, being cannot be an agent power that in affecting mind does not let mind apprehend being as what it is. When Socrates asks Theaetetus for the second time what knowledge is, Theaetetus says, Knowledge is not anything else than perception ( )33. Socrates then rephrases it, Perception, you say, knowledge (, , )34. Socrates does not just draw Theaetetus's attention to the fact that perception could not possibly give him access to is35, but that his is stands in for I assert, and behind this assertion lay an act of thought that connected perception with knowledge. " is a stand-in for thought: You will not

33. Plato, Theaetetus, 151 e2-3. 34. Theaetetus, 15 1 e 6. 35. Cf. Theaetetus, 185 c 3-e2.

208 SETH BENARDETE

find thinking without being, in which it (thinking) has been declared (8. 35- 6). What is wholly concealed in speech is thinking, and what seems to be wholly open in speech is being. Nonbeing, therefore, is that which is neither speakable nor thinkable (8. 8-9). It is that which claims to be while being wholly apart from thinking.

The Megarians, who thought they were following in the footsteps of Parmenides, wanted to separate each being into as many beings as showed up in the several speeches about it (T 211 Coxon). The speech about anything first divides it into subject and predicate and then puts them back together. The simplest speech does this through is. Is signais the putting together - - we are to do at the same time as it signais the separating - - that has already been done. The goddess's thus stands for a double act of thinking - disjoining and conjoining - that holds regardless of whether is existential or copulative, for the copulative conceals two existentials beneath it, that of the subject and that of the predicate. In Theaetetus's dfinition, - not anything else than - is the sign of disjunction, of conjunction. is even prsent when it is absent (4). ' , or That's it!, is a common Greek way - particularly frquent in Aristophanes and Plato - of expressing the insight that something is after ail () not just itself but really something else36. The way in which Parmenides indicates the doubleness of thinking is in the very form of the sentence, . , where the caesura falls after the , and thus isoltes from and binds it together. The parting and pairing of thinking show up in 37. The particles put together as they separate the pairing of and the parting of . That's not it announces either the breaking of a link between that and it, or it indicates that that is not the missing link that one was looking for.

The goddess also expresses the pairing and parting of thought in the two ways. In dividing and coupling them ( ... ) she thinks them. As a way on which one goes, does not stand at the beginning of one 's way but at the end, where and when one can say ' ; and likewise is not at the beginning of one's way, but it expresses what one says

36. Kiihner-Gerth, Ausftihrliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache, zweiter Teil: Satzlehre (Munich 1963), 1, 650, gives a list of examples; they could be multiplied.

37. Parmenides asks Aristoteles, ' , ; (What about whenever I say being and one, don't I say both? (Parmenides, 143 c 6-7). It is clear that Parmenides says , not , and is part of what he says. He himself put them together and urged Aristoteles to make them a couple: in Parmenides' poem only the gtes are in the dual () (1. 20).


at the end, when and where one realizes that something either is not or is not this. The way is not because one cannot start on it- the goddess does not say ' but because one cannot get through it. At the end of the way one can say respectively is or is not of each way, but at the beginning and along the way there is only one way, and as long as one keeps going it is the way of persuasion; but as soon as one is checked it turns into the way which is not. It is at this point that Truth ceases to attend on Persuasion. Then and only then can one say because it never was. Justice thus has a double position: she stands before the double gtes of a single way, and she judges after Parmenides passed through (8. 14). The blocking of the way Parmenides was on hints at what happens to the one and only way of thinking when nonbeing cornes to light; and the prsent trial ( ) in which being is now engaged, whether it is or is not, but in which judgment has already been passed (), indicates what thinking expriences when the way on which it is going proves to be the way it is38. One might infer from the nonknowability and noncommunicability of nonbeing that on the way of Persuasion one finally knows and points out that which is; but the goddess never says so. If it is through the persuasion of Justice that light is let in on the way of Persuasion, darkness must still linger in the house of Night. The way of Persuasion starts in not true trust, but it never goes beyond true trust (8. 28). True trust is the disclosure of that which is as a question, . It seems to be the quivalent of right opinion in Plato, which, Diotima suggests, in being that which hits upon that which is ( ), is the same as philosophyM.

The third fragment - - seems to follow directly on the second. It explains why Parmenides would not be able to know or point out nonbeing, for it is the same to think as it is to be. Parmenides, however, expresses this somewhat awkwardly. Why should he not hve formulated the thesis in a nominal sentence and thus avoided the

38. The at 2. 3 suggests how the sentence is possibly dpendent equally on - and and thus contains within it a pointer to the double character of the single way. Both the IHad and Odyssey conclude with a sudden realization that something is. The story up to that point is the way of for the final . Achilles says after he finds he cannot embrace Patroclus, {IHad, 23. 103-4); and Laertes says after he recovers from his swoon on recognizing his son, fj ' " (Odyssey, 24. 351). Each also illustrtes, from Parmenides' perspective, why is the obstacle to Truth. From an inner Greek point of view, Homeric - to be in doubt before two () paths - and would hve been heard together.

39. Symposium, 202 a 2-el .

210 SETH BENARDETE

misplaced , which should corne not after but after and mark the caesura? He could, after ail, had he wanted to retain , hve written something like * . announces that there is a couple, but it does not perform the coupling of thought; it merely tells one to think it through. The resuit of this thinking through is , the same. The same connects and divides. It connects and divides in just the same way as does. is the spoken sign of what thinking does, and what thinking does is the same as being (). be is to be thought. T , , , , and are five ways of saying the same. The logos of thinking and being is the same as each of its parts, for the of is the same as its .

Look! Despite beings being absent they are solidly prsent to mind ( ' ) (4. 1). The goddess asks Parmenides to look at what is absent. When day is prsent, night is absent. Through thinking one brings night back and makes it prsent with day; but day, although it is still prsent, is then no longer prsent for thinking, for day is now prsent to mind, and it is neither day nor night. The of and cancels the two of the day's prsence and the night's absence. This kind of thinking is not, however, what the goddess now has in mind. The goddess does not just mean that it makes no diffrence whether beings are prsent or absent, for they are always prsent to mind, but rather that they are prsent to mind because they are never apart from mind40. There is no coming into the prsence of mind; the beings are already securely there, since mind does not, as if it were empty prior to the prsence of the beings, make beings be or be prsent. The plural, however, disturbs. That Parmenidean being is one is so much a part of the doxographical tradition that one wants to ascribe the plural to a metrical necessity, as if Parmenides could not hve written if plurals were to be avoided at ail costs. The goddess says that it is indiffrent where she starts (5); she implies that at least in her speech being is not wholly prsent at every part of her speech. Speech necessarily breaks being apart. In its orderly ( ) going on its way, speech scatters and composes being (4. 3-4), despite the nonscattering and noncomposing of being itself. The caesura in the first line of the fourth fragment can be either before or after . If it is before, the prsence of being is by mind; if it is after, the absence of being is by mind. Either you or mind is the subject of - (4. 2). Either you or mind can eut away being from being, but being

40. The necessary bond between prsence and knowledge is expressed by Homer when he says of the Muses, (Iliad, 2. 485).

NIGHT AND DAY, ...: PARMENIDES 2 1 1

does not thereby become absent. It still holds onto the being from which it has been eut away. If Socrates is to examine justice, he must eut it away from wisdom, courage, and modration. As in the calculus of variations, the rest of virtue must be held steady and not be allowed to vary from opinion as he allows justice to vary in and from opinion. Socrates cannot look at a part if he has to look at the whole. He must look at a part apart. He must let a part apart from being be nonbeing. His looking away () from the being of a part is a looking toward () what it is apart. His looking away and toward does not affect the being of a part. It remains what it is for mind, even though what it is is not prsent to mind.

The being together ( v) of the beings is the common () and rational ( ) order of the beings. It is therefore indiffrent () for the goddess, but it is not indiffrent, rational, common, or together for Parmenides. The diffrence between the indiffrence of the goddess's order and the diffrence for Parmenides points to two orders. There is an order of parts in a whole, and there is the order of any composite order in time. The three parts of Parmenides' poem are apart. If they form a whole they imitate the ordered whole of the goddess's thought; but each of its parts unfolds in time and thus imittes the apartness of the parts for thinking. The apartness of the parts is more vident than their togetherness. Parmenides' narrative could not be more diffrent from the goddess's speech, and the goddess, in accordance with the apartness of Truth and Opinion, cuts her speech into two parts. What counteracts this and indicates the possibility of a whole are just two things: the goddess's way, on which Parmenides goes, and the indiffrence of any beginning for the goddess. This whole is elusive. Only if the enfolding of the unfolding that turned Parmenides' journey in time into the permanent order of time were the paradigm for the poem as a whole would that whole corne to light. The search for such a whole would force () Parmenides into an ongoing violation of the goddess's prohibition (7. 1-2). He would hve to resist turning his thought () away from an inquiry into the nonbeings if he were to dcide () on the very controversial proof of the goddess (7. 4). He could not simply exchange his ingrained exprience for a doctrine he is told he cannot understand. The nonbeings of exprience are ail he has. They are the opinions that penetrate () everything he sees and hears (6. 7). Thse opinions are the laws according to which the same and not the same hve been authorized by law () to be and not to be (6. 8-9)41. The goddess alludes not only to

41. That Parmenides does not mean the Heracliteans, as most commentaries believe, is indicated not only by but also by 7. 4-5, which unes are insparable in thought from 6. 7; see also K. Reinhardt, Parmenides, Frankfurt, 1959, p. 69, 87nl.

212 SETH BENARDETE

the of Justice, whereby the day of day and night is and is not the same as the day of day and night, but also to the gods. Zeus is and is not by law. Zeus is and is not the Persians' god, who is the sky open and visible to ail; Zeus is and is not the Egyptians' Ammon, who does not show himself as he is and whose name means the concealed42. One, the wise alone, is willing and not willing to be called by the name of Zeus43.

The fact that speaking no less than thinking be of being is right and necessary ( ' ) (6. 1). The goddess extends the necessity of thinking being to that of speaking being. That necessity, if it implies that no speech can be wholly false, would go far to explain why and its cogntes do not occur in the fragments we hve. The goddess, however, does not mean only that. She opposes to - (6. 2). is ' , not even one. One is the minimal condition for anything that is44. To be therefore means to be countable. , then, could mean to count. originally meant to gather and pick out. It meant () and ()45. It was the quivalent of insofar as it too combines and divides. In its alliance (...) with thinking it supplments the teaching that and concide with the necessity that insight () and putting two and two together () equally go together. That being is and what being is are insparable. The goddess seems to look forward to the five things she has to say about being in the eighth fragment: being neither cornes to be nor perishes (8. 3-21); being is indivisible (8. 22-26); being is immobile (8. 27- 33); being is a complte whole (8. 34-41); and being is like a sphre (8. 42- 49). What one figures out about being is not of the same order as the realization that being cannot be hypothetical. Mortal hypothses take three forms. The first involves the beings and nonbeings of the law (6. 8-9); the second in volves names of verbs (to become and to perish, to be and to be not, to change place and to change color, 8. 40-41); and last there are the names light and night on which the goddess 's account of opinion dpends (8. 53-59; 9). The goddess splits the structure of logos from the law that informs that structure. The cosmology of opinion is insparable from a theology: Eros is just the first of the gods to be devised. The necessary linkage that holds for Truth breaks apart in the speeches of opinion. Nouns

42. Herodotus, 1. 131. 2; 2. 42. 3-5. On the name Ammon, see K. Sethe, Amun und die Acht Urgotter von Hermopolis, Abhandlungen der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, philosophisch-historische Klasse, 1929, 4:87-90.

43. Heraclitus, fr. 32. 44. Cf. Plato, Sophist, 237 d 6-e 3; Theaetetus, 189 a 6-14. 45. Cf. Iliad, 23. 239-40: ... / .


and verbs wander away from each other and attach themselves arbitrarily and contradictorily. It is now impossible to say how far Parmenides went in exploring the relation in opinion between law, cosmology, and logos; but on the basis of what we do hve it would be a grave mistake to maintain that he did not distinguish among them. Surely he did not confound the nature () he speaks of thrice with the law (10. 1, 5; 16. 3). What guides the mind of men distractedly and makes them dumb and blind is law (6. 5-9). It is not the same as the deceptive order of words that the goddess gives to mortal opinion.

If one applies to the goddess's argument the distinction Plato's Thrasymachus makes between the literal ( ) or prcise () way of speaking, on the one hand, and, on the other, a loose ( ) way of speaking, so that, loosely speaking, whoever rules is a ruler by law, but only the ruler who as long as he rules never makes a mistake is a ruler in the prcise sens46, then the goddess seems to affirm, contrary to the difficulty Thrasymachus has in keeping truth and prcise speech together47, that prcision in speech concides with the real, and the imprcise way we hve of talking matches the unreality of what we talk about. Parmenides, however, represents the goddess to us in an image, and he has her prsent her argument in a mdium that in principle does not allow for the prcision she proposes and we want. We believe we know her argument better than she does herself, but we find that, against our wishes, she must speak imprecisely; and when she apparently does not, her very prcision seems to condemn being not to be48. She dnies to being either a past or a future, but she says it now is ( ) (8. 5). If, however, the past no longer is and the future is not yet, what is in the prsent according to prcise speech is the now, and the now without extension is not. The now, just as the point at the center of a sphre, is an instrument of knowledge and not a mark of being. The goddess's apparent failure to distinguish the entities of dianoetic speech from noetic being is the same as her apparent refusai to allow a part of what

46. tfepuW;c, 340dl-341b6. 47. Republic, 343 b 5: . 48. The nominal sentence is the instrument of prcise expression; it asserts an identity

that is no less noncircumstantial than nonexistential. Socrates once asked a friend whether the wise are wise by wisdom, and when he agreed, he went on to ask whether the just [are] just by justice and the lawabiding lawabiding by !aw. By omitting in the latter two cases, Socrates implies that there may be no one who is just by justice or lawabiding by law but rather by either hope or fear (Minos, 314 c 5-7). There is the same kind of argument at Hippias Major, 287 c 1-d 2, but being has been emphatically added: ; - ' - ; .

214 SETH BENARDETE

is to be eut away from the whole of what is, for that prohibition masks the necessity applicable to being alone, that its parts not be apart, but it does not apply to the way of understanding what is. The third part of the poem thus establishes the diffrence between the noetic and the dianoetic that the second part ran together. It ran them together, one suspects, because Justice, with its keys of either/or, was still in charge of the trial of being, and her demand for the Truth and nothing but the Truth could not keep the truth together with being. The second part is still subject to the law, for nature has not yet been discovered.

The nonbeings, the goddess says, would never be subdued () into being, and Parmenides is to keep his thought () away from this way of inquiry and not let habits that hve much exprience behind them ( - ) force () him to see what is not to be seen (), hear nothing but the echoes of hearsay ( ), and speak in a voice that does nothing but reproduce those echoes (7. 1-5). The goddess admits not only that there is one way of thought that goes along with habit and exprience but that Parmenides was on it and could not help but be on it; and she reminds him that habit, in which there is no prsent trace of violence, had to hve been ingrained through rcurrent blows of prior violence if the senss were to be deranged. This violence was the law; it is now experienced as the persuasiveness of second nature. No violence is available to break the hold that this second nature now has on Parmenides. Logos is the only weapon against it. It has to dcide () in favor of a very controversial proof ( ). is opposed to , and to . Her proof is nonexperiential: to philosophize is not to discard one set of habits and adopt another. The goddess states the conclusion - is the only speech of the way (8. 1-2) - as if it were the same as the going on the way. The eut between being and nonbeing is presented as if the nonbeings were there as nonbeings and did not hve to be discovered. Thought has to root out the ngation conceaied in barbarians and bring to light the duality in lawless49. The goddess speaks as if the nonbeings were not necessarily errors of thought and thus disguised as the beings open to view. She therefore hides the fact that the beings too must be lying in concealment and the mre ngation of the ngation conceaied in the nonbeings does not expose the beings to the light. The obvious puzzle of nonbeing has to yield to the hidden puzzle of being50.

Plato's Parmenides offers young Socrates a sample of hypothetical

49. Cf. Plato, Statesman, 262 c 10-263 a I; 301 b 10-c 4. 50. Cf. Plato, Sophist, 243 b 3-c 6.


gymnastic. Almost his entire vocabulary recurs in the eighth fragment about being. The gymnastic when it is in its complte form consists of two parts, with five sections in each51. The first part begins with whole/part and proceeds through modifications of it until it ends with rest/motion; the second part begins with same/other and proceeds through modifications of it until it ends with the temporal aspects of being. In the second hypothesis, Parmenides implies that whole/part and same/other are not derivative from one another52. Whole/part stands to same/other as paradigm to copy. Parmenides thus shows Socrates that he failed to consider the diffrence between the ideas he postulated and whatever participated in them: Socrates had thought that he had solved the only puzzle - participation - and there was nothing problematic in the ideas themselves. The first hypothesis, which is designed to look at the one in relation to itself, proves that none of the catgories, regardless of which of the pairs in each is taken, can hold for the one. In the case of the first five catgories, what alone would survive the disproof is the one of number; but the next five catgories, which would then test the one as the principle of ail numbers against the manifold of ones of which any number consists, show there can be no such participation, since the undifferentiable ones of number must fall back into the one that is their principle. Parmenides thus begins his gymnastic with an argument that that which is necessary for ail understanding - the countability of being - rests on a self-contradictory premise53. The one of number can be if it is by itself -neither a whole nor a part - but it cannot then be the one of the ones of number, which must be both the same as one another and other from each other. The goddess's own argument threatens to hve the same consquences. Being can be a whole, but it cannot allow for whatever must share in it- everything that is same and other, like and unlike, equal and unequal, in time, and with a past and a future. Socrates and the goddess hve thus split between them the problem of being54.

The goddess distinguishes between the many signs for the way and the single speech of the way (8. 1-3). Thse signs point first to the nonbecoming and nonperishing of what is (). The proof that follows and amplifies the meaning of the signs is the longest of the five proofs the goddess gives. The proofs are almost completely ngative in form and offer a much more

51. Parmenides, 137 c 4-142 a 8. 52. Parmenides, 146 b 2-5. 53. In the first of his ngative hypothses, Plato's Parmenides urges the complte

knowability of one regardless of whether it is or is not (Parmenides, 160 c 5-d 2). 54. Aristotle's solution - substantive, one, and being ail say the same - spartes the

one of v from the one of number that is by abstraction (Metaphysics, 1054 a 13-19).

2 1 6 SETH BENARDETE

extensive characterization of what does not hold for what is than what does. One can infer from them that whatever is not consists of many nonunique parts of many kinds that are in motion, incomplte and defective, with a past and a future, disconnected and apart, divisible, some more and some less, with a beginning and an end, without limits, random, diffrent in the diffrent, nonmeasurable, asymmetrical, and nonuniform (8. 4-49). Thse characterizations are indiffrent to whether something is becoming or perishing. They are of becoming itself insofar as becoming embraces becoming and perishing. The goddess seems never to speak of the becoming of becoming and perishing, just as she never spoke of the day of day and night55. She thus failed to ask whether there is a becoming of the becoming of becoming and perishing, or it is just as much as being is. It too cannot be from that which is not (8. 12-13). Eternity, then, would not be an exclusive privilge of being, and the absence of from the poem would not be due either to Parmenides' oversight or our lack of vidence56. The necessary parting of being from becoming and perishing has led to the equally necessary pairing of being with becoming in eternity. The impossible, then, is the ground for the being of the pairing, for it can neither be nor not be. Being, it seems, has to be rethought.

For almost any pre-Socratic one picks at random, whoever assigns to the nature of things either one or more principles and causes, it is clear that he could not hve proposed them without first assuming or arguing that the nature of things is a whole, within which everything cornes to be and passes away. He therefore was asserting that the whole has an intelligible and necessary structure that is accessible to man as man. He was speaking of noetic being no less than of perceptible becoming, of rest no less than of motion, and of what is always no less than of what is always changing. The ten signs to which the goddess appeals as indicating that being neither becomes nor perishes are the signs that almost ail of Parmenides' predecessors must hve accepted: (1) whole, (2) unique, (3) immobile, (4) complte, (5) now, (6) is, (7) together, (8) ail, (9) one, and (10) connected (8. 4-6). The most startling is now. Now is a mark assigned to it by mind. Now signifies that there is a whole that loses its temporality by an act of thought that steps out of time. Mind can only do this by canceling its own time. It cancels the temporal condition for its own thinking. It thus looks as if being is reduced to the nonbeing of a hypothetical point, but in fact now

55. If is the subject of in fragment 13, then could be the - of through the experiential understanding of our mortality in Eros.

56. Cf. Plato, Timaeus, 27 d 6-28 a 1.


stands as the barrier on the other side of which is , so that being may be the gathering of everything connected together into one ( ) outside of time. At the end of the poem the goddess says: According to opinion ( ) thse things came to be (), now are ( ) and thereafter will end (19.1-2)57. Becoming supplies the now that is the condition for mind that mind does not think when it thinks what is.

The goddess says that it is impossible to say or think that nonbeing is (8. 8- 10). The nonthinkability of nonbeing ( ) involves the thinking and speaking of the impossible ( ). It has to be thought that that which cannot fall into mind cannot fall into mind. The goddess goes on to say that Justice holds being in chains and does not relax them s that it can either become or perish (8. 13-15). Thse chains are the chains of double ngation: being cannot not be. Being is condemned to be in a trial that is already ver before it has begun, for its trial turns out just as it is necessary ( ). The issue of the origin of being from nonbeing seems to be a nonissue. The goddess asks five so-called rhetorical questions, in which the answer is given as soon as the question is put. The first two are in the future: What origin () will you seek for it? At what point [will you seek] its increase? (8. 6-7). One question is a counterfactual: What necessity would hve provoked it later or before to become, if it began from nothing? (8. 9- 10). And the last two questions are phrased as potential optatives: How would that which is be later? And how would it corne to be? (8. 19-20). Thse questions, however rhetorical they may be, hve to be put. They do not automatically go along with the necessity of thinking what is. To think the necessity of being does not concide with the necessity of thinking being. The principle nihil e nihilo fit is not the same as the principle of necessary being. Parmenides' predecessors started from the former and not from the latter.

The argument for the impossibility that being cornes from nonbeing is far longer than seems necessary. Even if one allows the goddess to indulge in rhetorical questions, there are still six lines that seem superfluous: they put being in the dock of a pseudo-trial over which Justice prsides (8. 13-18). Were being really on trial, the pronouncement of on it would mean Guilty! and would dclare its innocence. Being is a punishment for a crime that being must commit58. Its fate is to be guilty. The apparent

57. refers no doubt to both the things of becoming and their names: the names established by law came to be, now are, and will corne to an end.

58. Anaximander wrote in the first fragment that the beings, whose genesis is from the unlimited, pay the penalty ( ) for their injustice to one another according to the order of time. Latin sons (guilty) is the prsent participle of sum.

218 SETH BENARDETE

absurdity of this disappears if the goddess first prsents being as mortals primarily exprience it, and not as it is in itself. What it is in itself merges later, when she says, It remains the same in the same and lies by itself, and so fixed on the spot it abides, for mighty Necessity holds it in the bonds of limit and keeps it in on ail sides (8. 29-31). Necessity replaces Right. This replacement suggests how noetic being could show up amidst the names of mortals and what form it must hve taken. Utter nonbeing is the release that Justice never grants from the terror of the punishment that being is. It is best not to be born (cf. 12. 4). Creon says, Lead me out of the way: I am not more than a nonentity ( )59. Not even to be less than a nobody cancels the fear60.

The poetic constantly threatens to ruin the integrity of the goddess 's arguments. She undermines the uniformity and indivisibility of being by saying that that which is draws near to that which is ( ) (8. 25), as if that could not be taken to mean that the nonspatial inseparability of being does not preclude intelligible divisions in being. Nonbeing no more stands in the interval among the parts of being than anything stands between day and night if they are just the two parts of one day and do not include the perceptible gradations between them. In the goddess 's reprsentation of being, Justice, it seems, still stands in the way. The proof for the immobility of being involves its finitude, for only if being is with limits can it be intelligible (8. 26-33); but true trust pushes becoming and perishing away from it, and they wander very far from being, as if reason had not utterly dismissed them, but, though not fixed in the way that being is ( ), they still were somewhere and remotely connected with being. The constraints of Necessity on being, so that it is not imperfect or defective in any way, is said to be an established sacred law (), as if this did not imply that it was as hypothetical as the being of mortals (8. 32-3). Indeed, that being lies by itself (' ) could be taken as confirmation, since can be the perfect passive of , to posit and lay down. Thse excrescences on the language about being in the prcise sens culminate in the last argument of the goddess (8. 42-9). There she says that being is like the bulk of a perfect sphre, equal in ail directions from a center. Being could not hve been imaged at ail were it eut off as completely from everything it is not as the goddess seems to argue it is. Its image is a dianoetic construct, as Plato would say, and as hypothetical as everything else of mortal opinion. It belongs to the same kind of understanding that lies

59. Antigone, 1325. 60. Antigone, 1306-7.


behind the third part of Parmenides' poem; but now it has its place in the account of being and entails the same weaving together of being and nonbeing that any image necessarily has61. The goddess thus adds to the characteristics of being itself what belongs, in the scheme of Plato's Parmenides, to the relations that being has with its participants: likeness, measure, and equality.

The image of the sphre is the fifth and last argument about being before the goddess stops her trustworthy speech about truth and turns to the deceptive order of words that is as likely as it is imagistic (8. 50-3, 60). The image, then, straddles both Truth and Opinion. On the one side, it is symbolic and stands for the invariance of being regardless of the perspective from which it is viewed- the distance between mind and being is constant- and, on the other, it represents the modelmaking of cosmology, in which man is at the center of a sphre, and a diffrent kind of invariance holds. Man (), in being the light (), still stands at an equal distance from ail he surveys, but he himself has made the construction within which invariance holds. It is not an invariance supplied by being, mind, and natural light. The juxtaposition of the two images involves a distinction between and , whereby the phantastics of human understanding does not allow for an isomorphic translation of it into the eikastics of being. An ontology of necessity and a hypothetical cosmology can never be brought together into one. The structural resemblance of the two sphres is deceptive unless one recognizes the inversion of meaning that center and surface undergo in our passing from Truth to Opinion. This inversion marks the diffrence between the alien light ( ) (14) that discloses the world in cosmology from the built-in light of Truth in being62. The wandering of becoming and perishing at some indeterminately great distance from being differs from the necessary sparation of being and mind. Parmenides' poem, in coming back to where it started, images simultaneously two forms of completeness, both the nonhypothetical completeness of Truth and the hypothetical completeness of Opinion. It thus points to the necessary shortfall in the latter and our necessary falling short of the former.

In the speech of the goddess Truth has two unbreakable connections with Opinion. The first shows up in the now it needs but cannot use, since it is the quivalent of nonbeing. This now is due to the illusion of reprsentation,

61. Sophist, 240 a 7-c 2. 62. Cf. Philebus, 62 a 2-b 9. In this passage Protarchus accepts that we hve a need of a

false standard and a false circle if we are to find our way home; he grants in particular that the comprhension of justice itself, even if a logos follows its , does not suffice for a human being.

220 SETH BENARDETE

which unknowingly abstracts from action: it does not notice the time it takes to mark a point on a Une but imagines its instantaneity63. The second point of entry is the image that Truth must import from Opinion. In the speech of the goddess Opinion has two unbreakable connections with Truth. The first shows up in the necessary pntration of Truth into Opinion. Opinion holds that mind is nothing but the disposition of the body, but such an opinion cannot be true if the opinion is true, for without any warrant it has exempted itself from its own opinion. The second point of entry of Truth is through the now of becoming, which corrects the detemporalization of thinking and gives it its ground. The now of becoming too is an action of thought. That it necessarily dsigntes an indeterminate interval does not abolish its credentials as human thought64.

At exactly that point at which the goddess says that being falls uniformly in with limits, she stops her account (8. 49-50). The limit of truthtelling concides with the limit of being. The goddess thus seems to raise a counterclaim to Hesiod's Muses, who said they knew how to tell lies like the truth as well as the truth whenever they wished65. For Parmenides' sake, the goddess has separated the truth from a likely arrangement ( ) that Parmenides is to hear and learn in the deceptive order ( ) of the goddess 's words only after she has revealed to him the immobile heart of well-rounded Truth. Hesiod's Muses part truth from lies like the truth but do not disclose it apart from the truth that is solely inside lies like the truth. Parmenides' goddess also parts them, but she allows truth to be both inside and outside Truth. At the point ( ) of the uniform limit of being, she stops her speech (8. 51). Her speech about () Truth is also apart () from the truth66. Hesiod's Muses began with the triumph of Eros over the mind () of gods and men alike, and it ended with the triumph of mind () over Eros in the double form of motherless Athena and fatherless Hephaestus67. Parmenides' goddess begins with mind and brings in Eros at the end as a contrivance () of some goddess (13). Eros is by design, and for ail its experiential randomness he is mostly rational in design (12; 18). Parmenides' inversion of Hesiod also shows in the copresence of the Heliades with . In Hesiod, Helios and belong to diffrent family trees. The Sun is the offspring of

63. Cf. Plato, Republic, 527 a l-b2. 64. Cf. Plato, Timaeus, 38 b 3-5. 65. Theogony, 27-8. 66. is elsewhere adverbial and means apart and on ail sides (1. 12; 8. 31;

10.5). 67. Theogony, 120-122; 886-900; 924-9.

NIGHT AND DAY, ...: PARMENIDES 22 1

Theia, subdued in love by Hyperion, but is the legitimate daughter of Zeus' second marriage to Themis: nothing is said about love68. For the Muses can corne to be only when there is lawful marriage. One of her sisters is Eunomia, the goddess of law and order. Hesiod and Parmenides, however, despite the dissonance in the two poems' order of reprsentation, still seem to be in agreement: " and reflect the two fundamental expriences of mortals. The beautiful and the just are at the heart of the human.

The Muses' story, if one looks only at its endpoints and ignores their zigzag storytelling, is strictly genetic and finishes with the permanent order of mind. Parmenides' story depicts the unfolding in time of Parmenides' own rcurrent journey along with an atemporal account of being, on the one hand, and, on the other, a genetic account of becoming that presumably goes through birth and death again and again (19). The third part of Parmenides' poem is simultaneously cosmogonie, thogonie, and cosmological. It does not, however, correspond to what the goddess told Parmenides to expect: how opinion was fated to prevail everywhere. Instead of the necessary structure of opinion, we are given a causal account of nature. It reduced ail of becoming to two shapes, light and night, or, if one wishes, energy and matter, but it did not supply the ground for either lawful opinion or Parmenides' exprience of light and night. Among the verbs that mortals had laid down were change of place and change of bright () color (8. 41). Parmenides' journey into the light () was a spcial case of thse dsignations of motion; but the goddess transforms light and night from expriences into causal agents. Fire is now the quivalent of light, a dense and heavy body of night (8. 56-9). They are now substantives. She has split the structure of logos into a primary level of not true trust - verbs - that mortals trust to be true and a secondary level of theory - nouns - that consists in the deceptive order of her words69. The nonmanifestation of being, or the manifestation of nonbeing, ought to hve been the obstacle on the primary level that the way of Truth, in revealing its cause or causes, overcame. The secondary level, on the other hand, involves modelmaking, through which the goddess can show that the moon wanders with an alien light around the earth, always peering at the rays of the sun (14; 15).

It is just possible to make out the purport of this secondary level. The goddess implies that theory always has two components: modelmaking

68. Theogony, 371-4; 901-2. 69. Were it not that has a unique relation to , it might be thought that

has primacy over it, and belongs to theory. In some sence this is true. If, however, means it would in fact be the stamp on the diffrence between the two levels.

222 SETH BENARDETE

and causality. Its hypothesis about the nature of things wants to unify a geometrical image of things with the causal lments of things. She means not only that theory must remain hypothetical as long as thse two components are of diffrent orders, as they obviously are, for example, in Heraclitus's logos and fire, but also that the difficulty goes deeper. She expresses this difficulty when she says that mortal error consists in the refusai to make one shape out of the two they posited (8. 53-54)70. Had they unified them, they would hve given up the separate being of light and night for the quivalent of the day of day and night (8. 55-58). As a parallel to that day it would hve been called light, and just as day gives us time and its measures, so light would belong to a dianoetic model of nature at the expense of the explanatory power light and night retain as long as they are apart. Light as the one of light and night cannot be said to be, for by dfinition neither light nor night has anything in common with the other (8. 56). In keeping them apart, however, for the sake of being, they fell into the further difficulty of assigning being, which necessarily faits together with thinking, to that which cannot be thought. Light and night are never what they are: separate from each other, everywhere the same as itself, and not the same as the other are inapplicable to what is not (8. 56-58). Their attributes can only be perceived (8. 57, 59); and, if they are conceptualized into formulas that map out their mixtures and sparations, they cease to be (9; 12. 1-2). What light or night is vanishes in whatever numbers and measures they are assigned. Just as day is the one of day and night, so the light of light and night would always add up to one. The knowledge of the variable ratio between light and night would be gained at the expense of being. The dianoetic, in discovering the permanent but changing pattern of things, suppresses both the exprience and the nature of things.

Before light and night became causal agents, they seemed, through Parmenides' exprience of them, to stand for the actions of showing and not-showing. Not-showing is a kind of showing, since it shows not-showing (cf. 10. 3). Showing and not-showing belong to the structure of the whole. Being and nonbeing are respectively the showing and the not-showing of the whole. The goddess spoke as if the whole showed itself without any not- showing of itself; but no sooner did she corne to the conclusion of her account of Truth than she introduced the doubleness of an image. Even as the image of the sphre stood for the fixed distance between mind and being,

70. Tarn gives a good account for taking the phrase in this way.


so it stood for the not-showing of Truth inasmuch as it is not the truth of the whole. When young Socrates proposed the ideas to Parmenides, Parmenides' first question was whether the participants in an idea partook of the idea as a whole or a part, and Socrates said the idea was as a whole in each of the many7'. When Parmenides objected that this would make the idea apart from itself, Socrates came back with an image: No, it wouldn't, provided that it should be like a single day, which is the same in many places at the same time72. Socrates proposed the one of time and the many of place as the model for understanding the relation between an idea and its many particulars. Place individuates, time unifies73. Day brings each and every place out into the open. Parmenides immediately came back with a counter-image: a single sail that covers many people would still hve only a part over each. Parmenides brings in darkness, in which the individuals, each in his own place, become invisible. The idea-sail covers up everything. Nothing shows. Inadvertently, Socrates has stumbled onto the beginning of Parmenides' poem, where Parmenides' going into the light and unfolding in time was enfolded into the house of Night and became either the goddess's total enlightenment or mortals' total ignorance, deaf and blind alike, dumb with astonishment, tribes without discernment (6. 7).

Young Socrates, baffled by his inability to prserve the integrity of the idea, suggested in quick succession that it was a thought () and then a paradigm74. This squence is the same as the goddess's: she says being is a just before she says it is like a sphre. We thus hve three understandings of in: in place, in mind, in nature ( )75. Parmenides then ties Socrates up with an inextricable knot of his own. It consists in the impossibility of keeping together the knowledge the gods hve with the knowledge we can hve76. This is a fourth sens of in: and . This too has its parallel in Parmenides' poem. The goddess uses to know only in the part on mortal opinions; she tacitly dnies Parmenides any of the knowledge she has. Socrates, then, has been led in succession through the four ways of thought embedded in Parmenides' poem. The implication seems to be that thse four are necessary for thinking, but it is only when one has pushed through to Parmenides' own perplexity that one can go back, as he did, to the beginning and corne to an

71. Parmenides, 131 a4-b2. 72. Parmenides, 131b 3-4. 73. For this rle of time, see Timaeus, 37 c 6-d 7. 74. Parmenides, 132 b 3-133 a 10. 75. Parmenides, 132 d 2. 76. Parmenides, 133 a 1 1-134 e 8.

224 SETH BENARDETE

understanding of the true perplexity, knowledge of ignorance. This is to be on the way of the man who knows.

Somewhere in the third part, the goddess connected the cosmic order with sexual gnration. A female daimn, who joined maie and female together, was in the midst of bands of pure light - the milky way and the zodiacal planets and constellations - and bands of night shot through with portions of flame - the stars that are scattered throughout the sky (12): disorder crisscrosses order almost everywhere. The goddess then went on to distinguish between gender and makeup. Seed from the right testicle if it lodged in the right side of the utrus produced boys with the traits of their fathers; seed from the left testicle if it lodged in the left side of the utrus produced girls with the traits of their mothers; but if seeds from either right or left lodged in the opposite side of the utrus they produced either boys with the traits of their mothers or girls with the traits of their fathers (17; 18; 124-5 Coxon)77. In the case of thse crossovers, the Dirae, or Furies, troubled the offspring. They did it either ail the time, as the nonuniform distribution of cosmic light and night suggests, or on occasion. The Furies are the executive arm of Justice and, as far back as Homer and Hesiod, devoted to punishing sexual or generative irregularities78. Now Parmenides began his poem with himself as a boy () surrounded by female divinities, who led him to the gtes that Justice, equipped with the keys of retaliation, controlled. If we suppose that Parmenides represents himself as one of those who, in the split between their gender and their makeup, are at odds with themselves, then Parmenides begins his journey by divesting himself of female heat and presenting himself as the very model of maie coldness. Parmenides, then, would hve started out with a dniai of his own nature: the female would be light and he night. He then received, in self- ignorance, confirmation of this disjunction in the impossible apartness of being and becoming. What Parmenides does imaginatively, the parting of his own nature, the goddess then does rationally. She is the reprsentative of his own denaturalization. There is now pure mind and no nature. Parmenides would not hve understood that the goddess, in reaching across her body to grasp his right hand, was giving an external sign of his own crossed nature. Parmenides would thus reproduce the movement of Odysseus's account of his coming to understand himself. He who was the anonymity () of mind () in the encounter with Polyphemus discovered through Herm

«Night and Day,...» Parmenides 2

Documents

Transcript of «Night and Day,...» Parmenides 2