In my previous post I translated Parmenides fragment 8. Among the most perplexing frustrations, and trust me, there are many in an ancient epic hexameter poem, was the phrase I translated as, “Thought and that thing on account of which thought exists are both the same thing. For not without being, within which thought has been expressed, will you discover thinking.
I had previously struggled to understand what the sentiment was which Parmenides was conveying. On reflection, and perhaps with an appreciation for the midnight startle I woke up with pondering this sentence over and over again, and moreover, with the over-familiarity I have gained in having translated this sentence “into being”, I now think it rather a straightforward, but not obvious argument.
If there were no existence, nothing existing at all, we would not be able to express anything, for that very expression of something would itself be existing, (because it is something) and then something would, in fact, exist. The fact that something is verbally expressed demonstrates that something exists, namely at least the expressed and the expresser. In this sense they are the same thing.
Does Descartes simply steal a version of this argument away from Parmenides, or adapt it? “I think, therefore I am”, is closely akin to “I speak, therefore I am”, or perhaps more basically, “It is expressed, therefore it exists.”
Any Cartesians out there have a thought (and who also exist)?
Try Gadamer’s “The Beginning of Philosophy.” the so called scholars who have reduced Parmenides to the caricature produced by reading into “On Nature” as if Plato’s playwright hashing was anywhere near adequate is just plain narcissistically ignorant. I strongly recommend Peter Kingsley’s book “Reality” which is actually very true to the cultures and history of that slice of Mediterranean cultures. One of the big mistakes is assuming that Elea was a part of the Greater Greece, rather than a settlement linked to the merchants of the Phoceans and Phoenicians who operated as a network nation rather than being defined by the piece of land it occupied. relative to our current concept of nations as a territory. This ends up as a major injection of foolish Eurocentric conflation. Parmenides’s On Nature is more closely related conceptually to the early tantric/vedic cosmology/cultures via the Silk Road into Asia Minor than to the Mycenaen “Greeks” of Homer et al or the oligarchic of the later occupation of Athens etc. Zeno’s “paradoxes really were intended to demonstrate the truths of Parmenides’s On Nature. Some of the translations are really pathetic and way out of context. Similar thing are still be perpetrated by the so called “Biblical scholars” to inflate the importance of the Hebrews, rather than as custodians of material borrowed from nearby more established and scholarly centers. Even the Greek Persian war is usually told from the pirates and slavery based palatial “gift economies. Go deeper, Kingsley will help toward more relevant and historical context.