I. THE IDEALISTS
THE age of Pericles resembled our own in the variety and disorder of its thought, and in the challenge that it offered to every traditional standard and belief. But no age has ever rivaled that of Pericles in the number and grandeur of its philosophical ideas, or in the vigor and exuberance with which they were debated. Every issue that agitates the world today was bruited about in ancient Athens, and with such freedom and eagerness that all Greece except its youth was alarmed. Many cities—above all, Sparta—forbade the public consideration of philosophical problems, “on account of the jealousy and strife and profitless discussions” (says Athenaeus) “to which they give rise.”1 But in Periclean Athens the “dear delight” of philosophy captured the imagination of the educated classes; rich men opened their homes and salons in the manner of the French Enlightenment; philosophers were lionized, and clever arguments were applauded like sturdy blows at the Olympic games.2 When, in 432, a war of swords was added to the war of words, the excitement of the Athenian mind became a fever in which all soberness of thought and judgment was consumed. The fever subsided for a time after the martyrdom of Socrates, or was dissipated from Athens to other centers of Greek life; even Plato, who had known the very height and crisis of it, became exhausted after sixty years of the new game, and envied Egypt the inviolable orthodoxy and quiet stability of its thought. No age until the Renaissance would know such enthusiasm again.
Plato was the culmination of a development that began with Parmenides; he played Hegel to Parmenides’ Kant; and though he scattered condemnation lavishly, he never ceased to reverence his metaphysical father. In the little town of Elea, on the western coast of Italy, 450 years before Christ, there began for Europe that philosophy of idealism which was to wage through every subsequent century an obstinate war against materialism.* The mysterious problem of knowledge, the distinction between noumenon and phenomenon, between the unseen real and the unreal seen, was flung into the caldron of European thought, and was to boil or simmer there through Greek and medieval days until, in Kant, it would explode again in a philosophical revolution.
As Kant was “awakened” by Hume, so Parmenides was aroused to philosophy by Xenophanes; perhaps his was one of many minds stirred by Xenophanes’ declaration that the gods were myths, and that there was only one reality, which was both world and God. Parmenides studied with the Pythagoreans also, and absorbed something of their passion for astronomy. But he did not lose himself in the stars. Like most Greek philosophers he was interested in living affairs and the state; Elea commissioned him to draw up for it a code of laws, which it liked so well that its magistrates were thenceforth required to decide all cases by that code.3 Possibly as a recreational aside in a busy life he composed a philosophical poem On Nature, of which some 160 verses survive, enough to make us regret that Parmenides did not write prose. The poet announces, with a twinkle in his eye, that a goddess has delivered to him a revelation: that all things are one; that motion, change, and development are unreal—phantasms of superficial, contradictory, untrustworthy sense; that beneath these mere appearances lies an unchanging, homogeneous, indivisible, indissoluble, motionless unity, which is the only Being, the only Truth, and the only God. Heracleitus said, Panta rei, all things change; Parmenides says,Hen ta panta, all things are one, and never change. At times, like Xenophanes, he speaks of this One as the universe, and calls it spheroidal and finite; at times, in an idealistic vision, he identifies Being with Thought, and sings, “One thing are Thinking and Being,”4 as if to say that for us things exist only in so far as we are conscious of them. Beginning and end, birth and death, formation and destruction, are of forms only; the One Real never begins and never ends; there is no Becoming, there is only Being. Motion, too, is unreal, it assumes the passage of something from where it is to where there is nothing, or empty space; but empty space, Not Being, cannot be; there is no void; the One fills every nook and cranny of the world, and is forever at rest.†
It was not to be expected that men would listen patiently to all this; and apparently the Parmenidean Rest became the target of a thousand metaphysical assaults. The significance of Parmenides’ subtle follower, Zeno of Elea, lay in an attempt to show that the ideas of plurality and motion were, at least theoretically, as impossible as Parmenides’ motionless One. As an exercise in perversity, and to amuse his youth, Zeno published a book of paradoxes, of which nine have come down to us, and of which three will suffice. First, said Zeno, any body, in order to move to point A, must reach B, the middle of its course toward A; to arrive at B it must reach C, the middle of its course toward B; and so on to infinity. Since an infinity of time would be required for this infinite series of motions, the motion of any body to any point is impossible in a finite time. Second, as a variant of the first, swift-footed Achilles can never overtake the leisurely tortoise; for as often as Achilles reaches the point which the tortoise occupied, in that same moment the tortoise has moved beyond that point. Third, a flying arrow is really at rest; for at any moment of its flight it is at only one point in space, that is, is motionless; its motion, however actual to the senses, is logically, metaphysically unreal.*5
Zeno came to Athens about 450, perhaps with Parmenides, and set the impressionable city astir by his skill in reducing any kind of philosophical theory to absurd consequences. Timon of Phlius described
The two-edged tongue of mighty Zeno, who,
Say what one would, would argue it untrue.8
This pre-Socratic gadfly was (in the relative sense which our ignorance of the past compels us to give to such phrases) the father of logic, as Parmenides was for Europe the father of metaphysics. Socrates, who denounced Zeno’s dialectical method,9 imitated it so zealously that men had to kill him in order to have peace of mind. Zeno’s influence upon the skeptical Sophists was decisive, and in the end it was his skepticism that triumphed in Pyrrho and Carneades. In his old age, having become a man “of great wisdom and learning,”10 he complained that the philosophers had taken too seriously the intellectual pranks of his youth. His final escapade was more fatal to him: he joined in an attempt to depose the tyrant Nearches at Elea, was foiled and arrested, tortured and killed.11He bore his sufferings bravely, as if to associate his name so soon with the Stoic philosophy.