The Pre-Socratics Part 3: The Eleatic School

This school, as Diogenes Laertius tell us in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers is an Italian school influenced by Pythagoras. The common theme across this school is that motion is an illusion, everything is one, and the senses are unreliable. The Eleatics are rationalists, and would be the foundation of much of rationalist thought for thousands of years to come.

Xenophanes

Xenophanes is perhaps the earliest philosopher for whom a large amount of original material survives. While not all of it is philosophy, in fact, most of it is simple poetry, this still gives us a wonderful insight to his style and interests.

Xenophanes was quite significant for his critiques of the Greek gods Xenophanes critiques the existence of the Gods on five fronts. One, the Gods are immoral. Consider the Gods in Greek mythos: unruly, warring, adultering, bickering. They live a life that is often worse than the humans they are meant to govern over. Second, the claims of the physical resemblance of Gods to humans is questionable. There does seem to be no reason for this, and Xenophanes notes that if lions or horses could draw they would draw the Gods as lions and horses respectively. Third, Xenophanes critiques the idea of Greek gods dying and being born. If a God is born, it means there was some time before that God existed, which seems to conflict with the idea that Gods are immortal. Fourth, he critiques the idea that Gods can have a master. This is an attack mostly on Zeus being the mightiest God – after all, what kind of God is subservient to another? Finally, Xenophanes critiques that Gods meddle in human affairs, contrasting with the Homeric tales of Troy.

Xenophanes interpretation of God is much closer to some sort of Judo-Christian God. It is some sort of non-anthropomorphic, eternal, self-sufficient, independent, unmoving master of everything. Of course, this is not exactly the same. The Judaeo-Christian God is obviously very concerned with human affairs, and has some anthropomorphic qualities. , and concerned natural phenomena not to be signs from them but actual, natural phenomena to be inspected and understood as such.

Plato in his Sophist tells us that Xenophanes and later Eleatic philosophers thought that "everything was one". This is likely in relation to the concept of monism which came from Thales and other Milesian school philosophers. He was a dualist and posited that the fundamentals were earth and water. This is a departure to the earlier Milesian school who were monists. Rather than trying to reduce everything to a single substance, Xenophanes accepts the possibility of more than one building block. We will see this idea continue to expand as time goes on.

Parmenides

A student of Xenophanes but taking a slightly different course in some aspects. Again, Parmenides wrote in poems, which are difficult to decipher, and even basic aspects of his philosophy are debated.

Parmenides has a central argument that is well remembered today - he thought that everything was one and change is impossible. Our experience is an illusion. He is perhaps the most influential of the pre-Socratics. Part of the reason for this significance is how he proved his points: he appears to be the first to use deductive arguments to prove his points. Avid readers of the blog will know what a fan I am of deductive logic.

Fortunately for us, a rather large section of Parmenides' work survives, thanks to Simplicus, who managed to preserve some 150 lines of his poem. This is perhaps the largest body of originally surviving work from any pre-Socratic we have. Unfortunately, the style of poetry means interpretation is indeed challenging.

Parmenides argues that our experience of the world is merely an illusion. In reality nothing moves or changes. There are in fact no separate things – all reality is one thing that never moves or changes. He argues this because he considered "not being" an illegal term as such. Parmenides also disagrees with things "becoming" – if something was "born" it must have come from something that already exists, and not from something that does not already exist. Therefore, everything already exists, in the same way, motion already exists. Movements have to be into a space that is not being. Our senses give us faulty info and we need reason alone. An extreme rationalist, who in some ways mirrors the rationalists we would come to see much later in the history of thought.

Zeno of Elea

Zeno of Elea was a philosopher and also a politician. Although, using the term politician is perhaps misleading – Zeno attempted to overthrow the tyrant of Elea but failed. There are numerous stories of how he met his demise. Some accounts say he bit off the tyrants ear, some his nose, some say Zeno bit out his own tongue and spat it at the tyrant. At any rate, what they all have in common is that Zeno did not betray his friends under torture.

While you may not have heard the name of Zeno, you almost certainly will know of his paradoxes. Consider a man running in a stadium. To run the whole way he must run half of the length of the stadium. Then, he must run half the distance from where he ends up to the end, and so on, and so on. Each half he runs a shorter and shorter distance but is never able to quite reach the end of the stadium. Or consider Achilles racing a tortoise. If the tortoise is given a head start Achilles can never catch up, for by the time he does, the tortoise has moved forward some small distance, and by Achilles reaches that point the tortoise has moved forward again and so on and so on. A third argument concerns an arrow and a target – at every point in the arrow's flight the arrow is motionless since it occupies a space exactly equal to itself and (according to Zeno) something that occupies a space equal to itself is motionless. These Paradoxes were intended as a defence of Parmenides' position that motion is impossible.

Aristotle in his Physics is the primary source of these paradoxes, and he argues against them considerably. However, I think it is the modern age where we have the most complete answer to his paradoxes – many students of analysis will do the integration to show that these paradoxes are not quite as paradoxical as they seem.

Unfortunately, not much else about Zeno of Elea survives, the works actually written by him are scarcely 200 words, and such as with many pre-Socratic philosophers we will not be able to discuss much else to our dismay.

Melissus of Samos

Not much is known of Melissus. As a philosopher it seems he only wrote one text, of which only fragments remain. Accoridng to Simplicus, it is nothing more than a terrible rendition of Parmenides' poem, filled with misunderstandings and mistakes. Only those who are intellectually impoverished will bother to read it. The one advantage we have is that Melissus wrote in prose not in poem, and his primary contribution has been to help us understand Parmenides.

While I will not be quite so cruel, it can be said that Melissus' thought is very similar to that of Parmenides, and I will not dwell long. Melissus argues that being is an indestructible, immovable, and one whole. There are two distinct differences between Parmenides and Melissus. Parmenides thought that being was limited in some capacity, while Melissus thought that being was totally unlimited. Parmenides also thought that being took place in a timeless present, while Melissus thought that being was eternal.

For now, that is all I want to analyse of Melissus, while he did not make many original contributions to the Eleatic school, he was certainly good at summarising the arguments, which ended up being mainly what Plato and Artistotle later critiqued.

References

Sophist by Plato

Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius

Divination by M Tullius Cicero

De Iside es Osiride by Plutarch

Placita Philosophorum by Pesudo-Plutarch

Philosophy Before Socrates by Richard D McKirahan

Physics by Aristotle

History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russel

History of Philosophy by A. C. Grayling

The Presocratic Philsophers by Jonathan Barnes

Rhetoric by Aristotle

Preamble - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Socrates