very purest abstraction, undimmed by any reality, perfectly lifeless;
this moment--un-Greek, like no other in the two centuries of the
Tragic Age--the product of which is the doctrine of "Being," became a
boundary-stone for his own life, which divided it into two periods; at
the same time however the same moment divides the pre-Socratic thinking
into two halves, of which the first might be called the Anaximandrian,
the second the Parmenidean. The first period in Parmenides' own
philosophising bears still the signature of Anaximander; this
period produced a detailed philosophic-physical system as answer to
Anaximander's questions. When later that icy abstraction-horror caught
him, and the simplest proposition treating of "Being" and "Not-Being"
was advanced by him, then among the many older doctrines thrown by him
upon the scrap heap was also his own system. However he does not appear
to have lost all paternal piety towards the strong and well-shapen
child of his youth, and he saved himself therefore by saying: "It is
true there is only one right way; if one however wants at any time to
betake oneself to another, then my earlier opinion according to its
purity and consequence alone is right." Sheltering himself with this
phrase he has allowed his former physical system a worthy and extensive
space in his great poem on Nature, which really was to proclaim the
new discernment as the only signpost to truth. This fatherly regard,
even though an error should have crept in through it, is a remainder
of human feeling, in a nature quite petrified by logical rigidity and
almost changed into a thinking-machine.
Parmenides, whose personal intercourse with Anaximander does not seem
incredible to me, and whose starting from Anaximander's doctrine is
not only credible but evident, had the same distrust for the complete
separation of a world which only is, and a world which only becomes, as
had also caught Heraclitus and led to a denying of "Being" altogether.
Both sought a way out from that contrast and divergence of a dual order
of the world. That leap into the Indefinite, Indefinable, by which
once for all Anaximander had escaped from the realm of Becoming and
from the empirically given qualities of such realm, that leap did not
become an easy matter to minds so independently fashioned as those of
Heraclitus and Parmenides; first they endeavoured to walk as far as
they could and reserved to themselves the leap for that place, where
the foot finds no more hold and one has to leap, in order not to fall.
Both looked repeatedly at that very world, which Anaximander had
condemned in so melancholy a way and declared to be the place of wanton
crime and at the same time the penitentiary cell for the injustice of
Becoming. Contemplating this world Heraclitus, as we know already, had
discovered what a wonderful order, regularity and security manifest
themselves in every Becoming; from that he concluded that the Becoming
could not be anything evil and unjust. Quite a different outlook had
Parmenides; he compared the qualities one with another, and believed
that they were not all of the same kind, but ought to be classified
under two headings. If for example he compared bright and dark, then
the second quality was obviously only the _negation_ of the first;
and thus he distinguished positive and negative qualities, seriously
endeavouring to rediscover and register that fundamental antithesis
in the whole realm of Nature. His method was the following: He took a
few antitheses, _e.g.,_ light and heavy, rare and dense, active and
passive, and compared them with that typical antithesis of bright and
dark: that which corresponded with the bright was the positive, that
which corresponded with the dark the negative quality. If he took
perhaps the heavy and light, the light fell to the side of the bright,
the heavy to the side of the dark; and thus "heavy" was to him only
the negation of "light," but the "light" a positive quality. This
method alone shows that he had a defiant aptitude for abstract logical
procedure, closed against the suggestions of the senses. The "heavy"
seems indeed to offer itself very forcibly to the senses as a positive
quality; that did not keep Parmenides from stamping it as a negation.
Similarly he placed the earth in opposition to the fire, the "cold"
in opposition to the "warm," the "dense" in opposition to the "rare,"
the "female" in opposition to the "male," the "passive" in opposition
to the "active," merely as negations: so that before his gaze our
empiric world divided itself into two separate spheres, into that
of the positive qualities--with a bright, fiery, warm, light, rare,
active-masculine character--and into that of the negative qualities.
The latter express really only the lack, the absence of the others, the
positive ones. He therefore described the sphere in which the positive
qualities are absent as dark, earthy, cold, heavy, dense and altogether
as of feminine-passive character. Instead of the expressions "positive"
and "negative" he used the standing term "existent" and "non-existent"
and had arrived with this at the proposition, that, in contradiction to
Anaximander, this our world itself contains something "existent," and
of course something "non-existent." One is not to seek that "existent"
outside the world and as it were above our horizon; but before us,
and everywhere in every Becoming, something "existent" and active is
contained.
With that however still remained to him the task of giving the more
exact answer to the question: What is the Becoming? and here was the
moment where he had to leap, in order not to fall, although perhaps to
such natures as that of Parmenides, even any leaping means a falling.
Enough! we get into fog, into the mysticism of _qualitates occultæ,_
and even a little into mythology. Parmenides, like Heraclitus, looks
at the general Becoming and Not-remaining and explains to himself a
Passing only thus, that the "Non-Existent" bore the guilt. For how
should the "Existent" bear the guilt of Passing? Likewise, however,
the Originating, i.e., the Becoming, must come about through the
assistance of the "Non-Existent"; for the "Existent" is always there
and could not of itself first originate and it could not explain any
Originating, any Becoming. Therefore the Originating, the Becoming
as well as the Passing and Perishing have been brought about by the
negative qualities. But that the originating "thing" has a content,
and the passing "thing" loses a content, presupposes that the positive
qualities--and that just means that very content--participate
likewise in both processes. In short the proposition results: "For the
Becoming the 'Existent' as well as the 'Non-Existent' is necessary;
when they co-operate then a Becoming results." But how come the
"positive" and the "negative" to one another? Should they not on the
contrary eternally flee one another as antitheses and thereby make
every Becoming impossible? Here Parmenides appeals to a _qualitas
occulta,_ to a mystic tendency of the antithetical pairs to approach
and attract one another, and he allegorises that peculiar contrariety
by the name of Aphrodite, and by the empirically known relation of
the male and female principle. It is the power of Aphrodite which
plays the matchmaker between the antithetical pair, the "Existent"
and the "Non-Existent." Passion brings together the antagonistic and
antipathetic elements: the result is a Becoming. When Desire has become
satiated, Hatred and the innate antagonism again drive asunder the
"Existent" and the "Non-Existent"--then man says: the thing perishes,
passes.
10
But no one with impunity lays his profane hands on such awful
abstractions as the "Existent" and the "Non-Existent"; the blood
freezes slowly as one touches them. There was a day upon which an odd
idea suddenly occurred to Parmenides, an idea which seemed to take
all value away from his former combinations, so that he felt inclined
to throw them aside, like a money bag with old worn-out coins. It is
commonly believed that an external impression, in addition to the
centrifugal consequence of such ideas as "existent" and "non-existent,"
has also been co-active in the invention of that day; this impression
was an acquaintance with the theology of the old roamer and rhapsodist,
the singer of a mystic deification of Nature, the Kolophonian
_Xenophanes._ Throughout an extraordinary life Xenophanes lived as
a wandering poet and became through his travels a well-informed and
most instructive man who knew how to question and how to narrate, for
which reason Heraclitus reckoned him amongst the polyhistorians and
above all amongst the "historic" natures, in the sense mentioned.
Whence and when came to him the mystic bent into the One and the
eternally Resting, nobody will be able to compute; perhaps it is only
the conception of the finally settled old man, to whom, after the
agitation of his erratic wanderings, and after the restless learning
and searching for truth, the vision of a divine rest, the permanence of
all things within a pantheistic primal peace appears as _the_ highest
and greatest ideal. After all it seems to me quite accidental that in
the same place in Elea two men lived together for a time, each of whom
carried in his head a conception of unity; they formed no school and
had nothing in common which perhaps the one might have learned from
the other and then might have handed on. For, in the case of these two
men, the origin of that conception of unity is quite different, yea
opposite; and if either of them has become at all acquainted with the
doctrine of the other then, in order to understand it at all, he had to
translate it first into his own language. With this translation however
the very specific element of the other doctrine was lost. Whereas
Parmenides arrived at the unity of the "Existent" purely through an
alleged logical consequence and whereas he span that unity out of the
ideas "Being" and "Not-Being," Xenophanes was a religious mystic and
belonged, with that mystic unity, very properly to the Sixth Century.
Although he was no such revolutionising personality as Pythagoras
he had nevertheless in his wanderings the same bent and impulse to
improve, purify, and cure men. He was the ethical teacher, but still
in the stage of the rhapsodist; in a later time he would have been
a sophist. In the daring disapproval of the existing customs and
valuations he had not his equal in Greece; moreover he did not, like
Heraclitus and Plato, retire into solitude but placed himself before
the very public, whose exulting admiration of Homer, whose passionate
propensity for the honours of the gymnastic festivals, whose adoration
of stones in human shape, he criticised severely with wrath and scorn,
yet not as a brawling Thersites. The freedom of the individual was with
him on its zenith; and by this almost limitless stepping free from all
conventions he was more closely related to Parmenides than by that last
divine unity, which once he had beheld, in a visionary state worthy of
that century. His unity scarcely had expression and word in common with
the one "Being" of Parmenides, and certainly had not the same origin.
It was rather an opposite state of mind in which Parmenides found his
doctrine of "Being," On that day and in that state he examined his
two co-operating antitheses, the "Existent" and the "Non-Existent,"
the positive and the negative qualities, of which Desire and Hatred
constitute the world and the Becoming. He was suddenly caught up,
mistrusting, by the idea of negative quality, of the "Non-Existent."
For can something which does not exist be a quality? or to put the
question in a broader sense: can anything indeed which does not exist,
exist? The only form of knowledge in which we at once put unconditional
trust and the disapproval of which amounts to madness, is the tautology
A = A. But this very tautological knowledge called inexorably to him:
what does not exist, exists not! What is, is! Suddenly he feels
upon his life the load of an enormous logical sin; for had he not
always without hesitation assumed that _there were existing_ negative
qualities, in short a "Non-Existent," that therefore, to express it by
a formula, A = Not-A, which indeed could only be advanced by the most
out and out perversity of thinking. It is true, as he recollected, the
whole great mass of men judge with the same perversity; he himself
has only participated in the general crime against logic. But the
same moment which charges him with this crime surrounds him with the
light of the glory of an invention, he has found, apart from all human
illusion, a principle, the key to the world-secret, he now descends
into the abyss of things, guided by the firm and fearful hand of the
tautological truth as to "Being."
On the way thither he meets Heraclitus--an unfortunate encounter! Just
now Heraclitus' play with antinomies was bound to be very hateful to
him, who placed the utmost importance upon the severest separation of
"Being" and "Not-Being"; propositions like this: "We are and at the
same time we are not" --"'Being' and 'Not-Being' is at the same time
the same thing and again not the same thing," propositions through
which all that he had just elucidated and disentangled became again
dim and inextricable, incited him to wrath. "Away with the men," he
exclaimed, "who seem to have two heads and yet know nothing! With them
truly everything is in flux, even their thinking! They stare at things
stupidly, but they must be deaf as well as blind so to mix up the
opposites"! The want of judgment on the part of the masses, glorified
by playful antinomies and praised as the acme of all knowledge was to
him a painful and incomprehensible experience.
Now he dived into the cold bath of his awful abstractions. That which
is true must exist in eternal presence, about it cannot be said "it
was," "it will be." The "Existent" cannot have become; for out of what
should it have become? Out of the "Non-Existent"? But that does not
exist and can produce nothing. Out of the "Existent"? This would not
produce anything but itself. The same applies to the Passing, it is
just as impossible as the Becoming, as any change, any increase, any
decrease. On the whole the proposition is valid: Everything about which
it can be said: "it has been" or "it will be" does not exist; about
the "Existent" however it can never be said "it does not exist." The
"Existent" is indivisible, for where is the second power, which should
divide it? It is immovable, for whither should it move itself? It
cannot be infinitely great nor infinitely small, for it is perfect and
a perfectly given infinitude is a contradiction. Thus the "Existent"
is suspended, delimited, perfect, immovable, everywhere equally
balanced and such equilibrium equally perfect at any point, like a
globe, but not in a space, for otherwise this space would be a second
"Existent." But there cannot exist several "Existents," for in order to
separate them, something would have to exist which was not existing, an
assumption which neutralises itself. Thus there exists only the eternal
Unity.
If now, however, Parmenides turned back his gaze to the world of
Becoming, the existence of which he had formerly tried to understand
by such ingenious conjectures, he was wroth at his eye seeing the
Becoming at all, his ear hearing it. "Do not follow the dim-sighted
eyes," now his command runs, "not the resounding ear nor the
tongue, but examine only by the power of the thought." Therewith he
accomplished the extremely important first critique of the apparatus
of knowledge, although this critique was still inadequate and proved
disastrous in its consequences. By tearing entirely asunder the
senses and the ability to think in abstractions, _i.e._ reason, just
as if they were two thoroughly separate capacities, he demolished
the intellect itself, and incited people to that wholly erroneous
separation of "mind" and "body" which, especially since Plato, lies
like a curse on philosophy. All sense perceptions, Parmenides judges,
cause only illusions and their chief illusion is their deluding us to
believe that even the "Non-Existent" exists, that even the Becoming has
a "Being." All that plurality, diversity and variety of the empirically
known world, the change of its qualities, the order in its ups and
downs, is thrown aside mercilessly as mere appearance and delusion;
from there nothing is to be learnt, therefore all labour is wasted
which one bestows upon this false, through-and-through futile world,
the conception of which has been obtained by being hum-bugged by the
senses. He who judges in such generalisations as Parmenides did, ceases
therewith to be an investigator of natural philosophy in detail; his
interest in phenomena withers away; there develops even a hatred of
being unable to get rid of this eternal fraud of the senses. Truth is
now to dwell only in the most faded, most abstract generalities, in the
empty husks of the most indefinite words, as in a maze of cobwebs; and
by such a "truth" now the philosopher sits, bloodless as an abstraction
and surrounded by a web of formulæ. The spider undoubtedly wants the
blood of its victims; but the Parmenidean philosopher hates the very
blood of his victims, the blood of Empiricism sacrificed by him.
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And that was a Greek who "flourished" about the time of the outbreak
of the Ionic Revolution. At that time it was possible for a Greek
to flee out of the superabundant reality, as out of a mere delusive
schematism of the imaginative faculties--not perhaps like Plato into
the land of the eternal ideas, into the workshop of the world-creator,
in order to feast the eyes on unblemished, unbreakable primal-forms of
things--but into the rigid death-like rest of the coldest and emptiest
conception, that of the "Being." We will indeed beware of interpreting
such a remarkable fact by false analogies. That flight was not a
world-flight in the sense of Indian philosophers; no deep religious
conviction as to the depravity, transitoriness and accursedness of
Existence demanded that flight--that ultimate goal, the rest in the
"Being," was not striven after as the mystic absorption in _one_
all-sufficing enrapturing conception which is a puzzle and a scandal
to common men. The thought of Parmenides bears in itself not the
slightest trace of the intoxicating mystical Indian fragrance, which
is perhaps not wholly imperceptible in Pythagoras and Empedocles; the
strange thing in that fact, at this period, is rather the very absence
of fragrance, colour, soul, form, the total lack of blood, religiosity
and ethical warmth, the abstract-schematic--in a Greek!--above all
however our philosopher's awful energy of striving after _Certainty,_
in a mythically thinking and highly emotional--fantastic age is quite
remarkable. "Grant me but a certainty, ye gods!"is the prayer of
Parmenides, "and be it, in the ocean of Uncertainty, only a board,
broad enough to lie on! Everything becoming, everything luxuriant,
varied, blossoming, deceiving, stimulating, living, take all that for
yourselves, and give to me but the single poor empty Certainty!"
In the philosophy of Parmenides the theme of ontology forms the
prelude. Experience offered him nowhere a "Being" as he imagined it to
himself, but from the fact that he could conceive of it he concluded
that it must exist; a conclusion which rests upon the supposition
that we have an organ of knowledge which reaches into the nature of
things and is independent of experience. The material of our thinking
according to Parmenides does not exist in perception at all but is
brought in from somewhere else, from an extra-material world to which
by thinking we have a direct access. Against all similar chains of
reasoning Aristotle has already asserted that existence never belongs
to the essence, never belongs to the nature of a thing. For that very
reason from the idea of "Being"--of which the _essentia_ precisely is
only the "Being"--cannot be inferred an _existentia_ of the "Being" at
all. The logical content of that antithesis "Being" and "Not-Being"
is perfectly nil, if the object lying at the bottom of it, if the
precept cannot be given from which this antithesis has been deduced
by abstraction; without this going back to the precept the antithesis
is only a play with conceptions, through which indeed nothing is
discerned. For the merely logical criterion of truth, as Kant teaches,
namely the agreement of a discernment with the general and the formal
laws of intellect and reason is, it is true, the _conditio sine qua
non,_ consequently the negative condition of all truth; further however
logic cannot go, and logic cannot discover by any touchstone the error
which pertains not to the form but to the contents. As soon, however,
as one seeks the content for the logical truth of the antithesis:
"That which is, is; that which is not, is not," one will find indeed
not a simple reality, which is fashioned rigidly according to that
antithesis: about a tree I can say as well "it is" in comparison with
all the other things, as well "it becomes" in comparison with itself
at another moment of time as finally also "it is not," _e.g._," it is
not yet tree," as long as I perhaps look at the shrub. Words are only
symbols for the relations of things among themselves and to us, and
nowhere touch absolute truth; and now to crown all, the word "Being"
designates only the most general relation, which connects all things,
and so does the word "Not-Being." If however the Existence of the
things themselves be unprovable, then the relation of the things among
themselves, the so-called "Being" and "Not-Being," will not bring us
any nearer to the land of truth. By means of words and ideas we shall
never get behind the wall of the relations, let us say into some
fabulous primal cause of things, and even in the pure forms of the
sensitive faculty and of the intellect, in space, time and causality
we gain nothing, which might resemble a "_Veritas æterna?_" It is
absolutely impossible for the subject to see and discern something
beyond himself, so impossible that Cognition and "Being" are the most
contradictory of all spheres. And if in the uninstructed _naïveté_
of the then critique of the intellect Parmenides was permitted to
fancy that out of the eternally subjective idea he had come to a
"Being-In-itself," then it is to-day, after Kant, a daring ignorance,
if here and there, especially among badly informed theologians who
want to play the philosopher, is proposed as the task of philosophy:
"to conceive the Absolute by means of consciousness," perhaps even
in the form: "the Absolute is already extant, else how could it be
sought?" as Hegel has expressed himself, or with the saying of Beneke:
"that the 'Being' must be given somehow, must be attainable for us
somehow, since otherwise we could not even have the idea of 'Being.'"
The idea of "Being"! As though that idea did not indicate the most
miserable empiric origin already in the etymology of the word. For
_esse_ means at the bottom: "to breathe," if man uses it of all other
things, then he transmits the conviction that he himself breathes and
lives by means of a metaphor, _i.e.,_ by means of something illogical
to the other things and conceives of their Existence as a Breathing
according to human analogy. Now the original meaning of the word soon
becomes effaced; so much however still remains that man conceives of
the existence of other things according to the analogy of his own
existence, therefore anthropomorphically, and at any rate by means
of an illogical transmission. Even to man, therefore apart from that
transmission, the proposition: "I breathe, therefore a 'Being' exists"
is quite insufficient since against it the same objection must be made,
as against the _ambulo, ergo sum,_ or _ergo est_.
12