Parmenides and Rand

Metaphysics and Epistemology
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Objectivist positions often have a Parmenidean air to them - existence exists, that which is not, is not, etc - so I’m interested in hearing particularly Objectivist responses to the arguments that initiated western metaphysics.

“It is necessary to speak and to think what is; for being is, but nothing is not.” -P

Rand agrees so far, as I read her. Existence exists, “nothing” is a contradiction in terms. Ok. But from this premise, Parmenides deduces frankly bizarre conclusions.

“Either being exists or it does not exist. It has been decided in accordance with necessity to leave the unthinkable, unspeakable path, as this is not the true path, but that the other path exists and is true. How then should being suffer destruction? How come into existence? If it came into existence, it is not being, nor will it be if it ever is to come into existence. . . . So its generation is extinguished, and its destruction is proved incredible.” -P

Coming into being or being destroyed imply not-being. Since not-being is impossible, coming into being and destruction are likewise impossible. Therefore change of any sort is impossible, because any change whatever must be a kind of coming into being or destruction, even if it’s only the coming into being of relational properties of entities or something.

It gets even odder from there in. Parmenides concludes that movement is impossible (it’d be a form of change), that there is only one being (for two objects to be distinct there must be something separating them, either “nothingness” or another object. Nothingness doesn’t exist - see above - and another object just passes the problem up a level - now there’s another object to explain the distinctness of), and that this being is spherical. And thinks. Also, this is all written in Attic Greek and in dactylic hexameter.

Like I said, it gets absurd fast. But this is hardly some silly rationalist puzzle that can be handwaved out of existence. Plato and Aristotle both spilled a lot of ink answering the argument. Heidegger’s entire philosophical project can be read as a reaction to it.

What might Rand have to say?

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I don’t know if Rand commented on Parmenides.

We see change happening everywhere. We also see thing mutating into other things. A fire burns and we see smoke. So, we figure that things go out of existence only in the sense that they change into other things. We now have some understanding that constituent elements of things form into other things. However, I don’t see that as being an Objectivist criticism, more as being an explanation based on modern science.

As far as I am aware, Objectivism – qua philosophy – does not say that things cannot cease to exist. “Existence exists” is simply a fundamental induction that we get from all our observations. As long as we have observations and philosophy, that will remain true. As long as one human consciousness has still not gone out of existence, he will still hold the implicit premise that existence exists.

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What might Rand have to say?

That it’s ridiculous. Some Objectivists have claimed (you may have seen it in some posts here) that matter cannot be destroyed, that its form can only change, but that is a scientific conclusion, not a philosophical one, and is external to Objectivism.

You can see what she had to say about Parmenides in her review of Randall’s Aristotle – “the primitive gropings of Parmenides versus Heraclitus”.

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You can see what she had to say about Parmenides in her review of Randall’s Aristotle – “the primitive gropings of Parmenides versus Heraclitus”.

I’d be interested… where is this text available. Parmenidies begins with the axiom existence exists; or A=A, and his paradoxes are firmly rooted in the logical conclusions of this premise; following meticulously the law of non-contradiction. I’d like to look at the precise point in the argument where the two (Parmenidies and Rand) differ, and for what reasons; this should be possible with just comparing syllogisms.

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I’d be interested… where is this text available.

It appeared in The Objectivist Newsletter vol 2 no. 5 (1963), available on microfilm in a library near you (B1 .O2).

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Some Objectivists have claimed (you may have seen it in some posts here) that matter cannot be destroyed, that its form can only change, but that is a scientific conclusion, not a philosophical one, and is external to Objectivism.

Isn’t the interpretation of the conversion of mass to energy and back to mass as a “change of form” a philosophical one? Strictly speaking, all science can really say is that matter exists in one time period, energy in the next, and matter in a later. It seems that it takes the rational mind and a philosophy of some sort to leap to the conclusion that a conversion of form and not the annihilation of one entity and the consequent creation of another is occurring.

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Isn’t the interpretation of the conversion of mass to energy and back to mass as a “change of form” a philosophical one?

Seems to be so. But that does not yield the truth of the scientific claim “Existents may only change form”.

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I like Parmenides and I dedicated an essay on politics to him. As an archaic philosopher, he went astray quickly. His premises were correct, but the conclusions were flawed. Still, he was he first to say that Earth is a sphere. He is also the first (some say Pythagoras) to identify the Morning and Evening stars as special objects.

The thing with Aristotle is he came 200 years later. So, he had a lot of shoulders to stand on. I cut the archaics a lot of slack, they were pioneers, whatever their mistakes. Plato is a different matter. Thales, Democritus, that while milieu of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, they were intellectually very brave men.

Though not all were men. Likely, the “Milesian Way” (philosophy) was brought to Athens by Aspasia, a woman, who taught philosophy to Socrates and his generation. The Ionians had come to Athens after the fall of the Ionian Revolt in 499 BCE. (By the way, 13 cities, loosely confederated could not stand against the Persians. That was a lesson for 13 colonies later.)

Parmenides was the first to propose the paradox attributed to Zeno of Achilles and the Halves. So, as I said, he went astray… but he dared to go where there was no path…

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I like Parmenides and I dedicated an essay on politics to him. As an archaic philosopher, he went astray quickly. His premises were correct, but the conclusions were flawed. Still, he was he first to say that Earth is a sphere. He is also the first (some say Pythagoras) to identify the Morning and Evening stars as special objects.

Well, the shape of the Earth was never very much doubted except, perhaps, by a select few early Christian officials. Back in antiquity even the common fisherman could have told you that the Earth was round–he spent all day looking at a bent horizon.

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Parmenides is a good philosopher-figure to start with in the history of philosophy, because he set the tone for nearly the whole of the Western philosophical tradition since. And that is that he is a Rationalist. And nearly every major philosophical figure since then is a Rationalist in basic approach to ideas. And the consequence of that is an approach to ideas consisting of all kinds of deduction going on up there in the noggin without any grasp of a relation to the actual world. Parmenides started with a poorly-grasped and poorly-integrated premise “What is, is,” and from there deduced that the evidence of the senses are illusory. Aristotle, whose approach to ideas is much healthier, answered the “problem of change” by reference to things moving from potentiality to actuality. I don’t know if that answer deals with the “problem” at the right level of fundamentality, and I don’t know if his view of potentiality and actuality is even universally valid and applicable to everything we deal with in reality. And making specific claims about the nature and qualities of matter is doing science, not philosophy per se. So in approaching someone like Parmenides at an appropriate level of fundamentality, what do you say?

I think what you can do is something like an affirmation-through-denial, and point to where Parmenides drops context, or steals concepts, or simply begs questions. For example, just raise the question: Why is change supposed to imply a contradiction? When we speak of change, we aren’t, after all, speaking of something both being and not being at the same time and the same respect. The burden of proof is on Parmenides: why are we supposed to sacrifice what our senses tell us in order to conform to his particular interpretation of “what is, is”? The evidence of the senses should have been the first check on whatever theory that Parmenides (or anyone else) might want to draw from it. Philosophers that, from the get-go, tell us that the evidence of the senses are to be dismissed in favor of some rationally-deduced theory have FAILED at their job of doing philosophy.

Parmenides makes the claim that the change we observe implies a contradiction (and, contra Heraclitus, equally a Rationalist in method, ends up denying observation for the sake of Being and non-contradiction). You only need to ask “how so?”. At one moment in time you see a tree, and at another moment in time you see a stump and a log. Where’s the contradiction? Aristotle formulated the law of identity at the proper level of fundamentality not with potentiality and actuality, but with “at the same time and in the same respect.” In a Parmenidean metaphysics, nothing really happens or transpires. So here you can go with Aristotle and “at the same time and the same respect,” or you can go the route of the absurd, for no reason, and deny that things transpire.

You would have thought that Parmenides, so concerned with contradiction, would have been troubled by the contradiction between his theory and his observation that things happen. You would think that with his concern about “what is,” that what is, and not his theories, comes first. It’s a lesson that few philosophers have really managed to learn and apply to their thoughts. Parmenides paved the way for Plato (who denied the reality of change as the senses tell us, and affirmed that real Being is unchanging and eternal); Heraclitus paved the way for Hume – ostensibly an Empiricist but as Rationalist in his approach to ideas as any of them – and Hegel. The same mistakes keep popping up and getting recycled just in newer, more “fascinating,” and more complex ways.

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“Either being exists or it does not exist. It has been decided in accordance with necessity to leave the unthinkable, unspeakable path, as this is not the true path, but that the other path exists and is true. How then should being suffer destruction? How come into existence? If it came into existence, it is not being, nor will it be if it ever is to come into existence. . . . So its generation is extinguished, and its destruction is proved incredible.” -P

Just at first glance (and without reference to anything further), it appears that Parmenides is just taking the causal connection for granted. (I take his pointing to “another path” to mean metaphysical i.e. biological death of an individual man.) There is volition in operation here: a person’s parents had to conceive the child, so given that context “another path” isn’t possible.

As far as the issue of why man exists at all, I would refer back to the concept of identity. Regardless of evolutionary theory, the entity in question must operate according to his traits. He tried to force the premise underlying his question to lead elsewhere i.e. he was jumping to conclusions. Objectivists would certainly have problems with this line of thinking.