ELEATISM. — Philosophy of the school of Elea (a city of Magna Graecia, now Velia-Scavi, a station on the Naples–Reggio line), which includes Senophanes, Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus.
SENOPHANES OF COLOPHON, born around 570, died in 478 B.C., banished from his homeland, travelled as a rhapsode through Sicily and southern Italy, until he settled at Elea. In the most noteworthy of the elegiac fragments that have come down to us, he ridicules the doctrine of metempsychosis, asserts the need for wisdom in opposition to the prevailing athleticism, condemns the introduction of Lydian luxury into Colophon, and recommends the reasonable enjoyment of social pleasures.
Of the epic fragments, the most important are those in which he attacks the anthropomorphic polytheism of his contemporaries. “There is one God... who resembles mortals neither in form nor in thought; he is all eyes, all ears, all mind” (οὔλος ὄρξ, οὔλος δὲ νοεῖ, οὔλος δὲ τ᾿ἀκούει), and without effort governs everything with his wisdom (νόου φρενί). Men have falsely conceived the gods in their own image and likeness; in particular, Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods what is shameful and blameworthy—thievery, adultery, and mutual deception. It is uncertain, however, whether Senophanes’ conception of God should be understood in a monotheistic or pantheistic sense.
PARMENIDES OF ELEA, born around 530, died in 444 B.C., of noble family, statesman and legislator, felt the influence of the Pythagoreans and transformed Senophanes’ theology into a rigorously monistic metaphysics.
Of the 163 hexameters that have come down to us, some incomplete and a few others surviving only in Latin translation, more than two thirds deal with truth, that is, with the one and immutable being, in which reality and thought are identified; the remaining third deals with opinion, with mutable appearance. The first part is by far the more important. Being is complete (οὔλον), unique in its kind (μονογενές), without beginning and without end (ἀναρχον, ἀπανάτων, ἀτέλεστων); it neither was nor will be, but is now (that is, at every moment) all at once, a continuous unity (οὐδὲ ποτ' ἦν, οὐδ' ἔστιν, ἐπεὶ νῦν ἔστιν ὁμοῦ πᾶν, ἕν, συνεχές). Thought and the object of thought are identical (παύτὸν δ' ἐστὶ νοεῖν τε καὶ οὐνεκὲν ἐστι νόημα). The world of appearance contains only the opinions of mortals, which are not worthy of faith and seem to be explained by Parmenides through the opposition of light and darkness (φῶς and νῦς), which perhaps reproduce the hot and the cold (θερμὸν and ψυχρὸν) of Anzasimanitro.
The attempts to explain how, after resolving the problem of being, Parmenides should go on to address that of illusory appearance, however ingenious, do not seem satisfactory. The conjecture of Wilamowitz and Zeller that this is a probable hypothesis runs up against the very opposition between being and non-being, which allows of no more or less; the attempt of Diels and Burnet to discern in it an example of doxography conflicts with the innovative spirit of the age, apart from other difficulties, and Joël’s idea that it should be regarded as a critical exercise is no more fortunate. According to Reinhardt, the unity of the two parts of the poem is preserved by considering the physical doctrine an essential part of the theory of knowledge. The exposition of knowledge derived from pure conceptual thought must be followed by a description of the sensible world of appearance; and perhaps a much simpler explanation is that the philosopher could indeed devalue, but not annul, human experience.
ZENONE OF ELEA flourished around 460 B.C.; a devoted and zealous disciple of Parmenide, in response to those who believed his master’s doctrine implied contradictions, he attempted to show that if one admits the plurality of things existing in space and time, one falls into far graver contradictions.
If a plurality exists, it must consist of limited magnitudes; a limited magnitude will necessarily be both infinitely large and infinitely small: infinitely large because, being divisible to infinity, it is composed of an infinite number of parts; infinitely small because those very parts, even when multiplied to infinity, could not compose an extension, a magnitude. Against the possibility of motion, Zenone presents the famous argument known as "Achilles and the Tortoise," which can be reduced to this: for a moving object to traverse a given interval, it must first traverse half of it, then half of the remaining half, and so on without end. The flying arrow is at rest: indeed, the arrow must be at a given instant in a given point, and thus throughout its entire path; now, since the instant is indivisible, the arrow will be in these points not in motion. Zenone’s aporias are resolved, as is well known, by Aristotle’s doctrine of the actual continuity of space and time.
MELISSO OF SAMOS, the same individual who, as navarca, defeated the Athenian fleet at Samos in 440 B.C., resumes the direct demonstration of Parmenidean monism.
Being must be eternal and ungenerated, otherwise it would have arisen from nothing and would dissolve into nothing: it must be immutable, since every change is a coming-to-be and passing-away. Unlike Parmenide, who attributes a spherical form to being, Melisso asserts that it is infinite; for if it were limited, it would have a beginning and an end and would be bounded by nothing, which is unthinkable both with respect to space and to time.
The influence of the Eleatic school has been enduring and strong. In modern philosophy, some of Kant’s antinomies, naturally through many intermediaries, trace back to this source.