by Walter Pater
In opposition then to the anthropomorphic religious poetry of Homer, Xenophanes elaborates the notion, or rather the abstract or purely verbal definition, of that which really is (to on)+ as inconclusive of all time, and space, and mode; yet so that all which can be identified concretely with mode and space and time is but antithetic to it, as finite to infinite, seeming to being, contingent to necessary, the temporal, in a word, to the eternal. Once for all, in harshest dualism, the only true yet so barren existence is opposed to the world of phenomena — of colour and form and sound and imagination and love, of empirical knowledge. Objects, real objects, as we know, grow in reality towards us in proportion as we define their various qualities. And yet, from another point of view, definition, qualification, is a negative process: it is as if each added quality took from the object we are defining one or more potential qualities. The more definite things become as objects of sensible or other empirical apprehension, the more, it might be said from the logician’s point of view, have we denied about them. It might seem that their increasing reality as objects of sense was in direct proportion to the increase of their distance from that perfect Being which is everywhere and at all times in every possible mode of being. A thing visibly white is found as one approaches it to be also smooth to the touch; and this added quality, says the formal logician, does but deprive it of all other possible modes of texture; Omnis determinatio est negatio.+ Vain puerilities! you may exclaim: — with justice. Yet such are the considerations which await the mind that suffers itself to dwell awhile on the abstract formula to which the “rational theology” of Xenophanes leads him. It involved the assertion of an absolute difference between the original and all that is or can be derived from it; that the former annuls, or is exclusive of, the latter, which has in truth no real or legitimate standing-ground as matter of knowledge; that, in opposite yet equally unanswerable senses, at both ends of experience there is — nothing! Of the most concrete object, as of the most abstract, it might be said, that it more properly is not than is.
From Xenophanes, as a critic of the polytheism of the Greek religious poets, that most abstract and arid of formulae, Pure Being, closed in indifferently on every side upon itself, and suspended in the midst of nothing, like a hard transparent crystal ball, as he says; “The Absolute”; “The One”; passed to his fellow-citizen Parmenides, seeking, doubtless in the true spirit of philosophy, for the centre of the universe, of his own experience of it, for some common measure of the experience of all men. To enforce a reasonable unity and order, to impress some larger likeness of reason, as one knows it in one’s self, upon the chaotic infinitude of the impressions that reach us from every side, is what all philosophy as such proposes. Kosmos;+ order; reasonable, delightful, order; is a word that became very dear, as we know, to the Greek soul, to what was perhaps most essentially Greek in it, to the Dorian element there. Apollo, the Dorian god, was but its visible consecration. It was what, under his blessing, art superinduced upon the rough stone, the yielding clay, the jarring metallic strings, the common speech of every day. Philosophy, in its turn, with enlarging purpose, would project a similar light of intelligence upon the at first sight somewhat unmeaning world we find actually around us: — project it; or rather discover it, as being really pre-existent there, if one were happy enough to get one’s self into the right point of view. To certain fortunate minds the efficacious moment of insight would come, when, with delightful adaptation of means to ends, of the parts to the whole, the entire scene about one, bewildering, unsympathetic, unreasonable, on a superficial view, would put on, for them at least, kosmiotęs,+ that so welcome expression of fitness, which it is the business of the fine arts to convey into material things, of the art of discipline to enforce upon the lives of men. The primitive Ionian philosophers had found, or thought they found, such a principle (archę)+ in the force of some omnipresent physical element, air, water, fire; or in some common law, motion, attraction, repulsion; as Plato would find it in an eternally appointed hierarchy of genus and species; as the science of our day embraces it (perhaps after all only in fancy) in the expansion of a large body of observed facts into some all-comprehensive hypothesis, such as “evolution.”
For Parmenides, at his early day, himself, as some remnants of his work in that direction bear witness, an acute and curious observer of the concrete and sensible phenomena of nature, that principle of reasonable unity seemed attainable only by a virtual negation, by the obliteration, of all such phenomena. When we have learned as exactly as we can all the curious processes at work in our own bodies or souls, in the stars, in or under the earth, their very definiteness, their limitation, will but make them the more antagonistic to that which alone really is, because it is always and everywhere itself, identical exclusively with itself. Phenomena! — by the force of such arguments as Zeno’s, the instructed would make a clean sweep of them, for the establishment, in the resultant void, of the “One,” with which it is impossible (para panta legomena)+ in spite of common language, and of what seems common sense, for the “Many” — the hills and cities of Greece, you and me, Parmenides himself, really to co-exist at all. “Parmenides,” says one, “had stumbled upon the modern thesis that thought and being are the same.”
Something like this — this impossibly abstract doctrine — is what Plato’s “father in philosophy” had had to proclaim, in the midst of the busy, brilliant, already complicated life of the recently founded colonial town of Elea. It was like the revelation to Israel in the midst of picturesque idolatries, “The Lord thy God is one Lord”;+ only that here it made no claim to touch the affections, or even to warm the imagination. Israel’s Greek cousin was to undergo a harder, a more distant and repressive discipline in those matters, to which a peculiarly austere moral beauty, at once self-reliant and submissive, the aesthetic expression of which has a peculiar, an irresistible charm, would in due time correspond.
It was in difficult hexameter verse, in a poem which from himself or from others had received the title — Peri physeôs+ (De Naturâ Rerum) that Parmenides set forth his ideas. From the writings of Clement of Alexandria, and other later writers large in quotation, diligent modern scholarship has collected fragments of it, which afford sufficient independent evidence of his manner of thought, and supplement conveniently Plato’s, of course highly subjective, presentment in his Parmenides of what had so deeply influenced him.— “Now come!” (this fragment of Parmenides is in Proclus, who happened to quote it in commenting on the Timaeus of Plato) “Come! do you listen, and take home what I shall tell you: what are the two paths of search after right understanding. The one,
hę men hopôs estin te kai hôs ouk esti mę einai?+
“that what is, is; and that what is not, is not”; or, in the Latin of scholasticism, here inaugurated by Parmenides, esse ens: non esse non ens —
peithous esti keleuthos; alętheię gar opędei?+
“this is the path to persuasion, for truth goes along with it. The other — that what is, is not; and by consequence that what is not, is: — I tell you that is the way which goes counter to persuasion:
tęn dę toi phrazô panapeithea emmen atarpon? oute gar an gnoięs to ge mę eon ou gar ephikton?+
That which is not, never could you know: there is no way of getting at that; nor could you explain it to another; for Thought and Being are identical.” — Famous utterance, yet of so dubious omen! — To gar auto voein estin te kai einai + — idem est enim cogitare et esse. “It is one to me,” he proceeds, “at what point I begin; for thither I shall come back over again: tothi gar palin hixomai authis.”+
Yes, truly! again and again, in an empty circle, we may say; and certainly, with those dry and difficult words in our ears, may think for a moment that philosophic reflexion has already done that delightfully superficial Greek world an ill turn, troubling so early its ingenuous soul; that the European mind, as was said, will never be quite sane again. It has been put on a quest (vain quest it may prove to be) after a kind of knowled
ge perhaps not properly attainable. Hereafter, in every age, some will be found to start afresh quixotically, through what wastes of words! in search of that true Substance, the One, the Absolute, which to the majority of acute people is after all but zero, and a mere algebraic symbol for nothingness. In themselves, by the way, such search may bring out fine intellectual qualities; and thus, in turn, be of service to those who can profit by the spectacle of an enthusiasm not meant for them; must nevertheless be admitted to have had all along something of disease about it; as indeed to Plato himself the philosophic instinct as such is a form of “mania.”
An infectious mania, it might seem, — that strange passion for nonentity, to which the Greek was so oddly liable, to which the human mind generally might be thought to have been constitutionally predisposed; for the doctrine of “The One” had come to the surface before in old Indian dreams of self-annihilation, which had been revived, in the second century after Christ, in the ecstasies (ecstasies of the pure spirit, leaving the body behind it) recommended by the Neo-Platonists; and again, in the Middle Age, as a finer shade of Christian experience, in the mystic doctrines of Eckhart and Tauler concerning that union with God which can only be attained by the literal negation of self, by a kind of moral suicide; of which something also may be found, under the cowl of the monk, in the clear, cold, inaccessible, impossible heights of the book of the Imitation. It presents itself once more, now altogether beyond Christian influence, in the hard and ambitious intellectualism of Spinoza; a doctrine of pure repellent substance — substance “in vacuo,” to be lost in which, however, would be the proper consummation of the transitory individual life. Spinoza’s own absolutely colourless existence was a practical comment upon it. Descartes; Malebranche, under the monk’s cowl again; Leibnitz; Berkeley with his theory of the “Vision of all things in God”; do but present variations on the same theme through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By one and all it is assumed, in the words of Plato, that to be colourless, formless, impalpable is the note of the superior grade of knowledge and existence, evanescing steadily, as one ascends towards that perfect (perhaps not quite attainable) condition of either, which in truth can only be attained by the suppression of all the rule and outline of one’s own actual experience and thought.
Something like that certainly there had been already in the doctrine of Parmenides, to whom Plato was so willing to go to school. And in the nineteenth century, as on the one hand the philosophy of motion, of the “perpetual flux,” receives its share of verification from that theory of development with which in various forms all modern science is prepossessed; so, on the other hand, the philosophy of rest also, of the perpetual lethargy, the Parmenidean assertion of the exclusive reign of “The One,” receives an unlooked-for testimony from the modern physical philosopher, hinting that the phenomena he deals with — matter, organism, consciousness — began in a state of indeterminate, abstract indifference, with a single uneasy start in a sort of eternal sleep, a ripple on the dead, level surface. Increasing indeed for a while in radius and depth, under the force of mechanic law, the world of motion and life is however destined, by force of its own friction, to be restored sooner or later to equilibrium; nay, is already gone back some noticeable degrees (how desirably!) to the primeval indifference, as may be understood by those who can reckon the time it will take for our worn-out planet, surviving all the fret of the humanity it housed for a while, to be drawn into the sun.
But it is of Plato after all we should be thinking; of the comparatively temperate thoughts, the axiomata media, he was able to derive, by a sort of compromise, from the impossible paradox of his ancient master. What was it, among things inevitably manifest on his pages as we read him, that Plato borrowed and kept from the Eleatic School!
Two essential judgments of his philosophy: The opposition of what is, to what appears; and the parallel opposition of knowledge to opinion; (heteron epistęmęs doxa; eph’ heterô ara heteron ti dynamenę hekatera autôn pephyke? ouk enchôrei gnôston kai doxaston tauton einai?)+ and thirdly, to illustrate that opposition, the figurative use, so impressed on thought and speech by Plato that it has come to seem hardly a figure of speech at all but appropriate philosophic language, of the opposition of light to darkness. —
Well, then (Socrates is made to say in the fifth book of The Republic) if what is, is the object of knowledge, would not something other than what is, be the object of opinion?
Yes! something else.
Does opinion then opine what is not; or is it impossible to have even opinion concerning what is not? Consider! does not he who has opinion direct his opinion upon something? or is it impossible, again, to have an opinion, yet an opinion about nothing?
Impossible!
But he who has an opinion has opinion at least about something; hasn’t he? Yet after all what is not, is not a thing; but would most properly be denominated nothing.
Certainly.
Now to what is not, we assigned of necessity ignorance: to what is, knowledge.
Rightly: he said.
Neither what is, then, nor what is not, is the object of opinion.
No!
Opinion therefore would be neither ignorance nor knowledge.
It seems not.
Is it, then, beyond these; going beyond knowledge in clearness, beyond ignorance in obscurity?
Neither the one, nor the other.
But, I asked, opinion seems to you (doesn’t it?) to be a darker thing than knowledge, yet lighter than ignorance.
Very much so; he answered.
Does it lie within those two?
Yes.
Opinion, then, would be midway, between these two conditions?
Undoubtedly so.
Now didn’t we say in what went before that if anything became apparent such that it is, and is not, at the same time, a thing of that kind would lie between that which is in unmixed clearness, and that which wholly is not; and that there would be, in regard to that, neither knowledge nor ignorance; but, again, a condition revealing itself between ignorance and knowledge?
Rightly.
And now, between these two, what we call ‘opinion’ has in fact revealed itself.
Clearly so.
It would remain for us therefore, as it seems, to find that which partakes of both — both of Being and Not-being, and which could rightly be called by neither term distinctly; in order that, if it appear, we may in justice determine it to be the object of opinion; assigning the extremes to the extremes, the intermediate to what comes between them.
Or is it not thus?
Thus it is.
These points then being assumed, let him tell me! let him speak and give his answer — that excellent person, who on the one hand thinks there is no Beauty itself, nor any idea of Beauty itself, ever in the same condition in regard to the same things (aei kata tauta hôsautôs echousan)+ yet, on the other hand, holds that there are the many beautiful objects: — that lover of sight (ho philotheamôn)+ who can by no means bear it if any one says that the beautiful is one; the just also; and the rest, after the same way. For good Sir! we shall say, pray tell us, is there any one of these many beautiful things which will not appear ugly (under certain conditions) of the many just or pious actions which will not seem unjust or impious?
No! he answered. Rather it must be that they shall seem, in a
manner, both beautiful and ugly; and all the rest you ask of.
Well! The many double things: — Do they seem to be at all less
half than double?
Not at all.
And great, in truth, and little, and light, and heavy — will they at all more truly be called by these names which we may give them, than by the opposite names?
No! he said; but each of them will always hold of both.
Every several instance of ‘The Many,’ then — is it, more truly than it is not, that which one may affirm it to be?
It is like people at supper-parties he said (very Attic supper- parties!)
playing on words, and the children’s riddle about the eunuch and his fling round the bat — with what, and on what, the riddle says he hit it; for these things also seem to set both ways, and it is not possible, fixedly, to conceive any one of them either to be, or not to be; neither both, nor the one, nor the other.
Have you anything then you can do with them; or anywhere you can place them with fairer effect than in that position between being and the being not? For presumably they will not appear more obscure than what is not, so as not to be, still more; nor more luminous than what is, so as to be, even more than that. We have found then that the many customary notions of the many, about Beauty and the rest are revolved somewhere between not-being and being unmixedly.
So we have.
And agreed, at least, at the outset, that if anything of this sort presented itself, it must be declared matter not of knowledge, but of opinion; to be apprehended by the intermediate faculty; as it wanders unfixed, there, between. Republic, 478.