POLITICSESSAYSARGUMENT

THE IRISH RICHHow a new generation of Irish property tycoonsis changing the way the Irish see themselvesbj John Murray Brown

PARMENIDES: FATHER OFMODERN THOUGHTRaymond Tallis

WHY EASTERN EUROPE'SPOPULISTS ARENT SÓ BADIvan Krastev

OXFORD'SPOETRYWARSBernard Wasserstein

In this issue:

CHRIS HASKINSAre we headingfor Malthusianmeltdown?

ANDREW FEINSTEINon the ANCsawful choice

RORY STEWART VSSHERARD COWPER-COLES

Are we failing inAfghanistan?

consciences

FREDERIC RAPHAELJohn Berger'sbad faith

JULIAN BAGGINIWhy the Britisharen't as liberal asthey think

9"771359"502057'

PORTRAIT

portraitPARMENIDESby Raymond Tallis

The pre-Socratic philosopher sparked anintellectual revolution that still echoes today.Tetfor philosophy and science to continue toprogress in the 21 st century, we may need toembark on an entirely new cognitive journey

A lfred North Whitchead faraously described theEuropean philosophical tradition as "a series of

footnotes to Flato." Whether or not this is fair to thethinkers that followcd Plato, it is a gross injustice tothose that preceded him. Pre-erninent among thesewas Parmenides. Elizabeth Anscombe's riposte thatPlato might be regarded as "Parmenides's footnote"is not as perverse as it seems. While Plato's dia-logues are among the supreme philosophical worksof the western tradition, it was Parmenides whoestablished the implicit framework of their debates.

Plaío acknowledged that Parraenides had "magnif-icent depths." But there is more to Parmenides thanthis: in his thought, human consciousness had a cru-cial encounter with itself. This was, I believe, a deci-sive moment in the long awakening of the humanspecíes to its own nature. From this self-encounterresulted the cognitivo self-criticism, the profoundcriticai sense that gave birth to the unfolding intellec-tual dramas of metaphysics and science that have inthe last century or só approached an impasse.

Compared with Socrates, through whom Platoventriloquised his own thoughts in a series ofdramatised dialogues, Parmenides remains a shad-owy figure. Pretty well ali we know of him is that hewas a handsome patrician, born in Elea in southernItaly "of a rich and honourable race" (in Hegel'swords), and that he flourished in the first part of the5th century BC. It took another genius, Nietzsche, tomake Parmenides live as a human being.

Nietzsche saw that Parmenides was the pivotal fig-ure of the period between 600 and 400 BC, when thehistory of explicitly rational thought had its begin-ning. In his wonderful little book Philosophy in theTragic Age of Lhe, Gree/cs, Nietzsche imagined the"moment of purest, absolutely bloodless abstraction,

Raymond Tallis's book The Enduring Significance ofParmenides (Continuurn) will be published in 2008

unclouded by any reality" at which Parmenides arrivedat his vision of the world. lie admired Parmenides asone of those true thinkers who were prepared, as heput it in Thus Spake Zarathustra, "to feed on the acornsand grass of knowledge and for the sake of truth sutferhunger of the soul." He attributes a prayer to him:"Grant me, ye gods... but one certainty [even^ if it bebut a log's breadth on which to lie, on which to rideupon the sea of uncertainty. Take away everything thatcomes-to-be, everything lush, colourful, blossoming,illusory... Take ali these for yourselves and grant mebut the one and only, poor empty certainty. "

One attraction of Parmenides is that you can readhis complete surviving works in 15 minutes. His

arguments are set out in On Nalure, a rather prosaicpõem of which only 150 lines survive. The heart of hiscase is in Fragments 3, 6 and 8, where he sets out aworldview that even by the standards of philosophy is,as Aristotle said, "near to madness." His central argu-ment is só quick that if you blink, you will miss it.

It goes as follows. That which is not, is not."What-is-not" does not exist. Since anything thatcomes into being must arise out of what-is-not,objects, states of affairs and só on cannot come intobeing. Likewise, they cannot pass away, because inorder to do só they would have to enter the realm ofwhat-is-not. Since it does not exist, what-is-not can-not be the womb of generation, or the tomb of thatwhich perishes. The no-longer and the not-yet arevariants of what-Ís-not, and só the past and future donot exist either. Change, then, is impossible. Equally,multiplicity is unreal. The empty space necessary toseparate one object from another would be anotherexample of what-is-not. And since things cannot beanything to a greater or lesser degree—this wouldrequire what-is to be mixed with the diluting effectof what-is-not—the universe must be homogeneous.

By these arguments, Parmenides arrives at hispicture of the world as a single, undifferentiated,unchanging unity. Needless to say scholars have dis-agreed over exactly what he meant. They have ques-tioned whether he meant that the universe was onething, or only that it was undifferentiated. They havepointed out that since his põem is ali about "what-is-not," he could not have been sincere in his assertionthat what-is-not is unthinkable. They have won-dered whether he was using "is" in a predicativesense—as in, "The cat is black"—or in an existentialsense, as in, "The cat is." Some suggest that his con-clusions depend on a failure to distinguish these twouses, which weren't clearly separated until Aristotle.

Most damagingly, only half a century after thepõem was written down, Anaxagoras pointed outthat its central thoughts would, if true, be unthink-able. For if the thoughts have to be thought, they

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RAYMOND TALLIS PORTRAIT

have to come into being. Actual thoughts had by you,me or Parmenides are what philosophers call "occur-rents." They take place at a particular time, and arethought by someone who carne into being and willpass away at a particular time. An unchanging,undiffercntiated uníverse wonld not therefore beablc to contain the occurrent, differentiated thoughtthat it is itself unchanging and undifíerentiated.

While some cornmentators have suggested thathe was simply muddled, Parmenides hás attracted amultitude of respectful interpreters. Peter Kingsleyhás even suggested that his aim was to drive his lis-teners mad, or to experience death in life. Be that asit may, the afterglow of Parmenides's "moment ofabsolute, bloodless abstraction," which cast the day-light of the senses into darkness, hás transillumi-nated western thought. We are ali, to a greater orlesser degree, his cognitive ehildren.

Some of Parmenides's influence derives from hisnovel methods. His põem was the fírst píece of sus-tained argurnent in philosophy. He did not mercly pro-claiiri the truths he arrived at; he oílèred, to use PaulValéry's phasc, the "elementary courtesy" of proof.The corollary of this was that he felt that we werebound to accept any conclusion reached by valid argu-ment, however counterintuitive: "Whateveryou do, donot be guided by your dull eyes nor by your resound-ing ears, but test ali things with your thinking alone."Plato's contempt for the deliverance of the senses, and,later, Descartes's thought-led systernatic doubt, are inthe spirit of Parmenides. Parmenides's assertions thatwhat-is is and what-is-not is not were the fírst state-nient of the laws of thought, l ater formalised in Aris-totelian and subsequent systems of logic. In OnNature,in other words, we see thought coming to tliink aboutitself and setting down its own permissible limits. Par-menides actually asserts that "Thinking and thethought 'it is' are the same." To think of somethingthat is not is, he believes, implicitly to assert sirnultane-ously that it is and that it is not. He is thus plausiblycredited with proclaiming the law of contradiction.

l lis concern with the totality of what-is—withBeing as sueh—was the supreme expression of thepre-Socratic concern with the underlying nature ofthings as a whole. Parmenides is therefore the fírstmetaphysician, or perhaps more precisely ontologist,through his consideration of, to use Aristotle's phrase,"being qua being." His conclusion that reality is not atali as we experience it, and that it is static, opened theway to the profoundest intuition driving science: thattruth can lie outside of direct experience. While scien-tists ultimately check their beliefs against sense expe-rience, they are willing to countenance a counterintu-itive worldview that consigns qualitative experienceto the merely subjective. According to science, theworld in itself is colourless, soundless, tasteless,

odourless. Thereis nothing bright, colouredorprettyabout electromagnetic radiation.

Parmenides's influence is felt throughout philoso-phy and science in the notion that, as Jonathan

Barnes hás put it, "the basic stuff of the world hás anEleatic stability." Over the centuries, philosophershave been attraeted to the notion of a featureless,unchanging substance underlying everything. Whileempiricists like David Hume and, later, positivists likeErnstMach vigorously attacked thisidea, itremaineddominant until the last century. Even the empiricistsbuy into the scientific world picture, and it is difficuítto escape the impression that they feel that matter isthe ultimate reality. Materialism is overwhelminglythe orthodoxy in contemporary philosophy

Perhaps even more striking is the extent to whichthis "Eleatic" vision ha.s influenced science. The law ofthe conservation of matter gradually emerged as a fun-damental principie of modern science. When matterproved to be transformable into energy, Eleatic stabil-ity was upheld in the notion of the conservation ofmass-energy Most signiíicantly physics, the most fun-damental of ali the natural sciences, hás had at its heartan increasingly sophisticated account of the world asconsisting of indestructible atoms. According to the5th-century atomists, who argued in direct response toParmenides, apparent change was simply the reorgan-isation of ungenerated, imperishable atoms. This "lite"version of the Eleatic vision hás, since the late I9thcentury, taken something of a battering. Atoms seemto be dissolving into energy exchanges and probabili-ties. Some thinkers have even suggested that Heracli-tus—Parmenides's antithesis, who argued that every-thing was change—is now gettirig his say. The

Prospect JANCMRT 2OO8 49

PORTRAIT RAYMOND TALLIS

Parmenides*s work represents such anadvance in self-consciousness that it is noexaggeration to call it an "awakening"

Parmcnidean "obsession with stasis" (to use M ar yMidgley's phrase), however, hás returned in a draniaticform. Einstein's theories ofrelativity point to a "blockuniverse" in which change is observer-dependentrather than inherent, and tensed time (past, presentand future) is, to echo Einstein, merely an ilkision ("buta stubborn one"). More recently, some physicists h avequestioned the existence not only of tensed time but oftime itself. Perhaps more irnportant even than this isthe way the Parmenidean vision is ubiquitous m themost distinctive features of science: the equations thatassert the essential identity of what exists betbre andafter observed change, and the hunt for invariant lawswhich express the intuition that surfaee changeexpresses unchanging underlying patterns.

No one could sincerely acx:ept, even less live by,ParmenÍdes's conclusions, not only because they areunthinkable, but also because they contam a funda-mental error. This is easiest to spot in the assertion inFragment 3 that "Thinking and the tliought 'it is' arethe same"; in other words, that it is impossible to thinkof something that does not exist. This is, of course,incorrect: we are always thinking of things that h aveno reality outside of our thought. Resides, if thoughtwere confmed to what-is, thinking and Being wouldbe one and the same. Without a distance betweentliought and its objects, só that the thought can existin the absence of the object, thought would not beabout anything. It could not even be about what-is.Consequently there would be no space for truth orfalseliood. Parmenides's fundamental error is his fail-ureto allow for theentertainingof explicitpossibility.Thought is about what might be the case, rather thanwhat is the case. That, indeed, is why thinking is about"what-is" and "what-is-not," rather than simply being

B U T C H E R j

'Ali our geese are clinically obese'

aparlof "what-is." Parmenides, in short, overlooks thespace of possibility which is the world we collectivelycreate, and in which we live our lives steeped in thepresenee of the past and the anticipation of the future.

Nevertheless, Parmenides's achievement isextraordinary. In his short põem, thought and knowl-edge encounter themselves head on for the first time.This is such a huge advance in self-consciousness thatit is no exaggeration to call it an "awakening." Andnotwithstanding the invalidity of his conclusion,there is at the heart of his vision a fundamental truth:that the object of knowledge (captured in a name, athought, a proposition) is static compared with ourexperiences. This can be observed even in ordinaryperception. When, for example, we see a materialobject, we see it as the unchanging source of our fluc-tuating experiences of it. This is more evident whenthe object is picked out by a name whose meanhigmust, as Plato emphasised, be stable só that it can doits work of communication. As assertions, thoughtsand meanings become more general, só they stand forsomething that is ever more stable. Parmenides intu-ited a thought of the utmost generality whoseobject—Being, the siim total of what-is—would beutterly unchanging. This hás shown the way forphilosophers and scientists in what we might call thepost-Parmenidean era. While Plato, Parmenides'smighty footnote, most explicitly identified realitywith unchanging entities—so-called "ideas" or"fornis," accessible to the intellect insofar as it was notcurdled by sense experience—it is Parmenides's orig-inal intuition that hás pervaded western thought.

The pre-Socratic revolution in thought that Par-menides brought to its climax is, I believe, a

more compelling episteinological break than anythat Foucault claimed to discover in post-Renais-sance humanism. This raises the question: why did ithappen when it did? Why, hundreds of thousands ofyears after human beings woke to the outside worldas an object of knowledge separate from themselves,did they awaken to knowledge itself P What was itthat fostered this collision of human consciousnesswith itself, such that thought carne to think aboutitself and knowledge inquired into its own basis?

The pre-Socratie awakening was the result of aunique concatenation of circumstances in place by the7th century BC. In his classic investigation The OriginofGreek Thought, published half a century ago, JP Ver-nant connects the pre-Socratic awakening with the riseof the polis, or city state. Following the end of theMycenaean empire in the 12th century BC, the Greekslived in largely agrarian communities for nearly 400years. With increasing wealth and socioeconomic dis-parities carne a risk of serious disorder. A series ofpoli tical reorganisations led to the emergence of a par-

50 1'ros-bKl JANUARr SOfíft

RAYMOND TALLIS PORTRAIT

ticipatory democracy, with leaders who were increas-ingly accountable to the citizens they led. Implicit inthis was the assumption that aíl volces, at least of theminority who had citizen.ship, were equal. This princi-pie of equality gave persuasion rather than force orauthority greater importance as an instrument of gov-ernance. It was in this dialogic society, witíi an emerg-ing ethos of criticai discussion, that, in the 7 th centuryBC, Greek philosophy was born in lonia.

Another driver to the explicitness of thought thatmade the Parmenidean self-encounter of human con-sciousness more likely was the rise of cities. Citiesmake huge cognitive demands of their inhabitants. Acity is an "artefactscape," a densely woven network ofsigns to be interpreted, unexpected events to be han-dled and an endle.ss procession of strangers to be dealtwith. The city was not, of course, invented by theGreeks; bnt those that emerged in the Sth century BCwere quite unlike the palace-based cities of Myce-naean, Minoan and earlier cultures. In the latter, roleswere clear and circumscribed, individuais were moreimmediately legible and there was less casuai,unscheduled contact. The earliest city, Catai Huyuk,in what is now Turkey, was, despite its population ofseveral thousand, really a cluster of small, self-suffi-cient communities of fewer than 50 people who hadlittle contact outside their group. Nothing could bemore different from the buzzing, milling organised

confusion of the cities of the Sth century oriwards.Evidence from primates about tlie influence of the

size of social groupings on the brain may proveinstructive here. The primatologist Robin Dunbar hásfound a strong correlation between brain size and thesize of the cognitive groups—the number of individu-ais of whom one hás social knowledge rather thanwhom one merely lives with on a daily basis. In earlyhominids, these groups are of the order of 60 to 80. Ina Greek city, the number of people one had to deal withwould be enormous and greatly outsize the number offamiliars one would be living with.

Another important factor was trade. After the 9thcentury BC, the Greeks were increasingly driven over-seas to trade, particularly for cereais, which were inshort supply at home. The trading colonies werelargely peaceable, and the colonisers outnumbered bythe indigenous peoples. It was as colonisers—like Par-menides in Elea—that the pre-Socratics were bornand flourished. Athens did not produce a native-bornplulosopher of stature until the 5th century BC. Life asthis sort of coloniser would have required mastering acertain type of communication. In order to make them-selves clear to strangers, who would not have sharedtheir assumptions, background or knowledge, expatri-ate Greeks would have had to make their thoughtsmore explicit. This would have had the consequence ofmaking thein more aware of themselves—their own

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Prospect JANUARY 2OO8 51

PORTRAIT RAYMOND TALLIS

thoughts and their own knowlcdge. They would h avebecorne aware of alternative points of view, and of theirown distance from the majority vicwpoint.

There is one more important driver: writing. Thisis an extraordinary technology: it stores human con-sciou.sness outside of the human body. Even morethan speech, itmakes consciousness visible and public,therefore exposing it to criticlsm. As the linguist RoyHarris put it: "Writing... separatas pre-literatemankind from true knowledge." Of coursc, writinglong antedated the pre-Socratic awakening. Forms ofproto-writing have been obscrved on boné tools dat-ing back to 9,000 BC. But when literacy returned toGreece .some time in the Sth or 7th century BC, ittook a radically different form. The Greeks took overthe wonderfully flexible alphabet of the Phoeniciansand turned it into something more versatile by usingspare characters to stand for vowels. Ali writing inmajor cultures since hás been based upon the Greekalphabet. What is more, when writing returned, itwas not subordinated to the needs of a monolithicstate, nor was it limited to scribes. Many of the earli-est examples of writing in Greece are metrical, theirpurpose being to entertain rather than inform, and ithás been suggested that the invention of the Greekalphabet was prompted by the wish to make a perma-nent record of oral epic poetry. The unlooked-for con-sequence of this was thought that thinks abou t itself.As Catberine Osborne observed, "philosophy wasinvented at about the time memorable poetic dis-course began to give way to written texts."

AU of these factors prepared the way for the pre-Socratic awakening whieh established the frame-work in which subsequent cognitive revolutionshave taken place. We may think of what happened ashumanity's most decisive step fòrward into its essen-tial nature as the "explicit animal."

What significance might this have for the pres-L-nt? It is arguable that the revolution in

thought started by the Parmenidean vision—belief inan unchanging unclerlying reality that defies thesenses—hás run its eourse. Over the last century,tliere hás been a growing feeling that in crucial áreasof knowledge, we have reachecl an impasse.

For instance, the endeavour to turn the scientiíkgaxe on our own consciousness hás run into a brickwall. Although you wouldn't know it from the excite-ment surrounding brain science, we have inade noprogress in understanding how it is that we are con-scious and are aware of being located in a world thatwe in part construct and in part encounter as a given.Nor shall we. The Parmenidean dismissal of senseexperience, which hás licensed the notion that realityis the no-person physical or material world, and thatthe quahties we perceive in it are merely secondary,

hás made a neuroscience of consciousness impossible.Dismissing the importance of subjective experiences,or "qualia"—a common ploy among the champions ofneurophilosophy such as Daniel Dennett—keeps theirnpression of progress alive, but this is cheating. Bio-logical science—-evolutionary theory and só on—isincreasingly assimilating itself to physics, chemistryand mathematics. Gene-eyed evolutionary theory andthe rise of molecular biology forge closer connectionsbetween the biosphere and what Richard Dawkinshás called "the bhnd forces of physics." Not only doesthis deepen the tension between an objective under-standing of ourselves as organisms and our sense ofbeing conscious agents, it exposes the biological sci-ences to the difticulties our understanding of thephysical world is encountering. At the apex of con-temporary physics, we have two mighty theories—quantum mechanics and the general theory of rela-tivity—which are incompatible. The attempt to unitethe two theories in "superstring theory" hás pro-duced a sterile landscape of IO500 largely untestabletheories (altliough for a new approach, see "Labreport," page 46). Quantum mechanics, as RichardFeynman repeatedly pointed out, is incomprehensi-ble, for ali its extraordinary effectiveness. Unresolvedissues around the role of the observer—with his "dulleyes" and "resounding ears"—have haunted modernphysics: he insinuates himself as a ghost among theatoms even as physics tries to free itself from the past,present and future that matter só much to humans. Inconsidering what was to be accounted as real, Par-menides excluded ali that matters to us in our lives,and thus paved the way for a vision of a materialworld void of meaning. This hás brought huge mate-rial benefits, but now seems less viable as the founda-tion of a secular understanding of the world. We nolonger seem to know how to proceed in attempting tomake better sense of the kinds of beings we are andthe universe in which we are situated.

It may be time, therefore, to go back to the timewhen our cognitive godfather set us on a road to thesecular understanding that hás been só wonderfnllyelaborated over the 2,500 years since. We need toreturn to the Parmenidean moment to see whether,without losing ali the gains that post-Parmenideanthought hás brought us, there inight be another cogni-tive journey from that which western thought hástaken. Precisely because Parmenides was our greatbeginning, we should try to reimagine his thought andits consequences, in the hope of awakening out of hisawakening to one more closely answering to our needfor wholeness of understanding. •

FROM THE PROSPECT ARCHIVE

lan Stewart on Platonic mathematicíanswww.prospeci-magazine.co.uk

52 Prosfwct JANUARY VOOS