After Parmenides What?

What doesn’t belong and why? Philosophy, Science, Literature, or Social Studies? 

Philosophy, of course. In the other disciplines, new information and new interpretive schema are constantly emerging, endlessly enriching their subject matter. Not so, philosophy! In fact, here the reverse is true. Arguably, philosophy’s greatest achievements lie in its distant past.

Parmenides of Elea is generally regarded as the Father of Western Philosophy. Of course, he had precursors (e.g. Thales, Pythagoras, Anaximander), but our knowledge of their teachings is sketchy at best. From what we do know, it seems as though these OGs were narrower in their focus than Parmenides – somewhat like philosophers today.

Indisputably, Parmenides was the dominant intellectual influence in the 5th century BCE, the golden age of Greece. He did not win that honor by default. He lived in ‘interesting times’, sharing the intellectual stage with political leaders, Leonides and Pericles, playwrights,  Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes, and fellow philosophers, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles and Zeno.    

We can say this much for sure: the oldest substantially intact work of systematic philosophy in the Western World is Parmenides’ ontological poem, On Nature. Happily, the Father of Western Philosophy did not pussy foot around; he asked the big questions:

• What is reality, really?

• How is it that appearances appear?

• How are what-is and what-seems-to-be related?

• Can you honestly say that we’ve moved beyond these issues 2500 years later?

Parmenides divided his poem into three sections: First, a short prologue; then Aletheia (Truth); finally, Doxa (Appearances). The prologue sets the poem in a narrative context and makes it clear (to me if not to all) that no account of the World can be complete without accounting for its dual aspects of Aletheia and Doxa. 

Aletheia models the world as noumenal, Doxa as phenomenal; and regarding the relationship between the two…silence, uncomfortable, enigmatic silence.

Western philosophy is the history of our effort to understand that silence, or to break it. First, there are those who deny the silence: “Parmenides must have spelled out his ideas; we’ve just lost that portion of the manuscript.” Then, there are those who have graciously offered to ‘correct’ Parmenides’ oversight. i.e.  to fill in the blanks. Present company excepted, few have been willing to take Parmenides’ silence at face value in an effort to understand it.

There are roughly 20 intact fragments of On Nature, each independently preserved by ‘a trusted source’, such as Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch,  Cicero, Simplicius, Clement, and Eusebius – just to drop a few names.

From these fragments, it is possible to reconstruct a coherent text. It is ludicrous to assume that Parmenides’ curators somehow failed to retain the one fragment of text that would have explained the entire work and unlocked its hidden meaning. 

So we can turn our attention to Parmenides’ editors – well meaning folk who have volunteered to add what Parmenides obviously meant to say to what he actually did say. Thanks but no thanks!

However, in their zeal to correct Parmenides’ oversights, these philosophers left a trail of breathtaking ideas that constitute what we study when we study Western Philosophy. 20th century philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, wrote that Western philosophy is a series of footnotes on Plato.    

Whitehead was half right. Western philosophy can be read as footnotes on Plato but only if Plato is read as footnotes on Parmenides. No doubt, Socrates’ disciple is Parmenides’ best known editor and commentator; but he was far from the first and possibly not the most important.

In fact, Plato’s grasp of pre-Socratic philosophy was ‘incomplete’…at best. I could say more…but I don’t wish to appear impolite. Three 5th century philosophers should primarily be credited with continuing Parmenides’ great project: Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and Zeno.  

All three played at ‘fill-in-the-blanks’ but in their defense, what else is a neo to do? On the plus side, their emendations preserved the spirit of Parmenides’ work. I’m not sure that he would have endorsed all their formulations but I think he would have recognized them as valid extensions of his own thought.

Speaking of which, in Fragment #1, the goddess tells our pilgrim, “It is right that you should learn all things, both the steadfast heart of persuasive truth and the beliefs of mortals…how things that seem had to have genuine existence, permeating all things completely.”

For the ‘persuasive truth’ we turn to Fragment #8: “…What-is is ungenerated and imperishable, whole…and complete. Nor was it once nor will it be since it is now all together, one, continuous…Thus coming to be is extinguished and perishing not to be heard of. Nor is it divisible since it is all alike.”

But regarding ‘the beliefs of mortals’, Fragment #8 continues: “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, to change place (motion), and to exchange bright color.” This is the realm of Doxa. 

 If order is your thing, you’d have loved the Big Bang. That is the moment when order in the Universe was at its maximum. Not so surprising when you consider that all energy was concentrated in a singularity – at a dimensionless point or perhaps in a Planck-sized Space. If only my desk were so well ordered.

Entropy (S) is how we measure disorder. S was at its cosmic minimum at Big Bang and it will be at its cosmic maximum at Heat Death.

Knowing this, you might be less surprised when I share my view that European philosophy reached its pinnacle in the 5th century BCE…before Socrates, Plato or Aristotle. This was the century of Parmenides, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles and Zeno.    Not to mention Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes… or Leonides and Pericles. Who says there’s no such thing as a Golden Age?

Someone sharing my view of Intellectual History might think that Hebrew theology peaked with Torah and Christian theology with the writings of John and Paul. It is certainly possible to understand the balance of the Old Testament as ‘commentary on Torah’ and all of Christian theology as ‘commentary on the New Testament’. So, why not treat the corpus of Western philosophy as commentary on the pre-Socratics?

(20th century British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, said that all Western philosophy was commentary on Plato; but he was wrong. Plato himself was a commentator on the pre-Socratics…and not an especially good one.)

Each of the major pre-Socratics contributed a unique perspective to the burgeoning science of cosmology. Heraclitus, for example, is known for Panta Re (“everything flows”). Anaxagoras is known especially for his trademarked meme, Pan in Panti Hot Link (‘everything in everything’). 

Anaxagoras’ universe begins as the undifferentiated entirety - pure energy in the Big Bang model. Nous (mind/soul) injects a quantum of rotation which propagates throughout the whole. This circularity could be understood as the first flicker of recursion, a precursor of consciousness. 

Gradually, this rotation triggers a wave of centrifugal force. The undifferentiated mass begins to separate, like attracts like, and soon sub-regions emerge, each with its own signature mix of properties. “Signatures of all things I am here to read.” (Joyce) Eventually, these sub-regions will become what we know as ‘events’, i.e. actual entities. 

Anaxagoras’ genesis is different from that of other philosophers. Each actual entity retains a trace of every element buried in the original mass. Entities are distinguished, not by their elements, which are the same in every case, but by the signature variation in the concentration of those elements in each entity.

If Parmenides was the apostle of stability and Heraclitus the prophet of change, Anaxagoras was the oracle of solidarity. He understood that a stronger bond among entities was needed to preserve the integrity of a universe in flux. 

When it comes to Universe, the problem is not so much explaining its diversity as it is accounting for its ultimate unity. Anaxagoras achieves the requisite solidarity in two ways. First, as noted above, everything interpenetrates and shares elements with everything else. In fact, every entity contains the ‘seeds’ of all entities. Theoretically, if the entire universe were reduced to a single organism (cell), genesis could begin again with barely a pause for a methane rich breath. 

This model is remarkably close to the modern science of genetics. The RNA/DNA molecule may have synthesized only once on Planet Earth. It is likely that every cell contains genetic material descended from that original DNA molecule. 

But DNA is as inefficient as it is powerful. Likely, it is so powerful because it is so inefficient! The genome of a common fern is 50 times longer than the human genome. On the other hand, some bacterial genomes are 5,000 times shorter than human DNA. 

But size does not matter! Less than 2% of our genes code for proteins (the primary function of DNA) anyway and less than 20% are ‘expressed’ in any one organism (cell). However, unused genetic material is not useless; it can always be accessed if environmental changes favor a different combination of phenomenal traits. Tens of thousands of years of evolution can be by-passed by visiting ‘the stacks’ in the vast and ancient ‘library’ of your DNA. As climate change gets real, we may be glad for our airconditioned library. 

Second, Anaxagoras’ universe is scale agnostic. Patterns repeat up and down the ladder, from the infinitesimal to the infinite. We are mesmerized by scale. The vastness of it! There are c. 60 orders of magnitude from Planck scale to Universe. But Anaxagoras shows that scale is a local phenomenon only. From a global perspective it just endlessly repeats, and it is impossible to distinguish any one stage from any other. Scale is a relative measure, not an absolute one.

So Anaxagoras could be known as ‘Father Fractal’. In an Anaxagorean universe every macro pattern is made up of congruent micro patterns. Each macro pattern is in turn a micro pattern in an even larger macro. And, of course, every micro pattern is a macro with respect to other micros. Pan in Panti.

Every entity includes the ‘seeds’ of every other entity and is in turn included as a ‘seed’ in each of those other entities. As with our DNA model, the entire entity is encoded in the seed. Every entity is a pattern which reflects the patterns of the micro entities that constitute it and is reflected in the pattern of the macro entities it constitutes.  

This odd cosmic topology is not found only in Anaxagoras. Are you familiar with the New Testament? Part of the genius of early Christianity is the doctrine of Incarnation – the idea that God, Being per se, locus and creator of Universe, is incarnate as a quantum being (Jesus Christ) in that Universe. That’s solidarity! Pan in Panti.

But this topology is not limited to the Incarnation per se. Every day, it is repeated in the celebration of Eucharist. Jesus, human and divine, body and soul, under the appearance of bread and wine, is consumed by the communicant who is immediately ‘uploaded’ into Jesus’ mystical body. Pan in Panti.

In Romans (8: 26), Paul tells us that when we pray (to God), it is actually the Holy Spirit (God) who searches our hearts and intercedes for us ‘with inexpressible groanings’. In First Corinthians (15: 24-29), he tells us that all creation flows up to Christ who hands it on to the Father ‘so that God may be all in all’. Pan in Panti. 

In the so-called Age of Reason, Leibniz resurrected Anaxagoras for his Monadology. Briefly, Leibniz’ universe consists of monads, each one reflecting all others: Pan in Panti. 

Finally, in the 20th century, Alfred North Whitehead created what may be the last great philosophical system of our era. Process and Reality is full of ideas that would have felt at home in 5th century BCE Greece: 

The universe consists solely of one class of ‘things’: Actual Entities (aka Events). Each actual entity configures the common Multiplicity of past events into its own unique Actual World. Each actual entity executes judgment on that actual world (‘the gods of Egypt’ - Exodus 12: 12) as it ‘prehends’ all other actual entities (or to use Whitehead’s terminology, ‘as it feels them’) and acts to bring the elements closer to an ideal pattern. 

In Whitehead’s model, every ‘trajectory’ connects God’s Primordial Nature (conceptual values) with God’s Consequent Nature (concrete entities). As with his contemporary, Robert Frost, Whitehead’s ‘roads diverge’…but end up at the same destination.

Whitehead’s model sets up a kind of universal reflexivity. Every event is ‘in God’ and God is in every event; therefore, every event is in every event. Every event is even an element of itself. How’s that for recursion? 

With this topology, how is it the Universe does not just seize-up at birth? For that answer, we needed to wait for Jacques Derrida in the latter half of the 20th century. Every event includes itself as an element. A’ є A. But A’ is not strictly speaking equal to A. A and A’ are separated by what Derrida called differance, an infinitesimal difference. Differance is the origin of process, Proust’s uneven cobblestones. 

Every event consists of the same members, uniquely configured. The cosmos, then, is God’s Kaleidoscope. A limited number of elements generate innumerable unique patterns…and we have a pre-Socratic to thank for this insight. 

David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com.

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