Seth Benardete

Night and day,... : Parmenides

In: Mtis. Anthropologie des mondes grecs anciens. Volume 13, 1998. pp. 193-225.
Rsum
Night 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, tre
divinement guid ou rechercher la voie de la vrit - l'auteur dveloppe tout particulirement une rflexion sur le chemin de la
desse.
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, Parmen
ides 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).
NIGHTAND DAY, ...: PARMENIDES 199
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.
NIGHT
AND DAY, ...: PARMENIDES 203
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.
NIGHT AND DAY, ...: PARMENIDES 205
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.
NIGHTAND DAY, ...: PARMENIDES 207
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).
NIGHT AND DAY, ...: PARMENIDES 209
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: ... / .
NIGHTAND DAY, ...: PARMENIDES 213
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.
NIGHTAND DAY, ...: PARMENIDES 215
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.
NIGHT AND DAY, ...: PARMENIDES 217
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.
NIGHTAND DAY, ...: PARMENIDES 219
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 zig
zag 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.
NIGHT AND DAY, ...: PARMENIDES 223
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 Herms'
showing of the moly that he too had a nature: he was mind and shape
77. See Tarn, pp. 263-6.
78. Iliad, 9. 453-6; 21. 412; Theogony, 183-5.
NIGHT AND DAY, ...: PARMEN1DES 225
together. Once he was armed with this knowledge, not even Circe, though
she could unman him, could enchant him79. So Parmenides, through the
submission of Justice to soft persuasion, and without any self-knowledge,
was led to a self-diremption, in which he gave up his nature for the sake of
being ail of a pice. Only through a return to his nature can he renew his
journey.
Seth BENARDETE
79. Cf. Seth Benardete, 77je Bow and the Lyre, pp. 63-90.