PARMENIDES vs. HERACLITUS

Parmenides (active 475 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher, leader of the Eleatics. The Eleatics was a school of pre-Socratic philosophy that flourished in the 5th century BC. It took its name from the Greek colony of Elea (Velia) in southern Italy. It is distinguished by its radical monism. Monism is the doctrine that mind and matter are formed from, or reducible to, the same ultimate substance or principle of being.

Parmenides asserted that true being and knowledge, discovered by the intellect, must be distinguished from appearance and opinion, based on the senses. He held that there is an eternal One, which is timeless, motionless, and changeless.

His general teaching has been reconstructed from the few surviving fragments of his lengthy verse composition On Nature. He held that the multiplicity of existing things, their changing forms and motion, are but an appearance of a single eternal reality, "Being." This doctrine, which was formulated as the principle that "all is one," entails that all claims of change or of non-Being are illogical. Because of his method of basing claims about appearances on a logical concept of Being, he is considered a founder of metaphysics. Plato's dialogue Parmenides discusses his thought.

The Way of Truth is the way of the intellect; it discovers True Being, which is unitary, timeless, motionless, and changeless although spatially limited. Its opposite, Non-Being, cannot be intellectually known and is therefore to be denied as a concept. The contradictory Heraclitean notion of Simultaneous Being and Non-Being is also denied.

[According to Heraclitus, there was no permanent reality except the reality of change; permanence was an illusion of the senses. He taught that all things carried with them their opposites, that death was potential in life, that being and not-being were part of every whole-therefore, the only possible real state was the transitional one of becoming. He believed fire to be the underlying substance of the universe and all other elements transformations of it. He identified life and reason with fire and believed that no man had a soul of his own, that each shared in a universal soul-fire.]

According to Parmenides, The Way of Opinion, that is the usual path of mortals, deals with the evident diversity of nature and the world perceived through the senses. The validity of sense data and of the objects perceived through the senses is denied. Parmenides insists on not confusing the physical objects with those of the intellect. Underlying all physical reality are the external opposites, Fire and Darkness. A mixture of the two governs the makeup of all organic life.

Parmenides's importance lies in his insistence on the separation of the intellect and the senses. His allegorical discussion of the paths of thought represents the earliest attempt to deal with the problems of philosophical method.