Chapter 9

Fifth special law: the term of thought endures

1363. We have seen that an instant is simply the beginning or term of what endures (whether it is an ens or an act of an ens). There can be no instant therefore without duration. An instant can be conceived only as the limit of duration and in duration, in the way that a mathematical point is the term of a line and conceived only in the line and by means of the line.
Believing that there is an ens which can exist for a single instant is a base illusion of those who have not formed an accurate concept of an instant. Such an ens would have no duration whatsoever because the instant would not have any duration, and what does not endure is not an ens.

1364. The Italian schools of Magna Graecia noted this important truth and from it deduced the principle of cognition. Let us see the controversies it caused.
Parmenides distinctly expressed 'the principle of cognition' in the following verse preserved by Simplicius(189) and by Proclus:(190) 'You do not know non-being, because it cannot be,'(191) and in another fragment, also preserved by Simplicius:(192) 'It cannot be spoken, nor can the mind reflect on it. It is nothing,'(193) which is a principle so obvious and so patently in agreement with common sense that only an extremely corrupt sophistry could refute it. The first and most famous Italian philosophers therefore made the 'principle of cognition' the firm foundation of their philosophy.

1365. But as soon as they applied it, they encountered great difficulties. They understood that if some ens is the only object of thought, its qualities and conditions must be investigated. This investigation is necessary if we are to know whether something expressed in a proposition is thinkable or not, that is, whether it is or is not, whether the proposition says something or nothing, and whether what we believe we are thinking is an appearance or a truth.
Unity and duration were among the first properties which they saw. They concluded that anything which is not one and does not endure is nothing, and cannot be the object of thought. I will deal here only with duration , as I have already spoken briefly about one .

These thinkers quickly found themselves with a result repugnant to common sense. The philosophical concept of motion, as I have given it, was not yet established. The concept held by people in general and then uncritically taken up by the schools, supposes that motion takes place without interruption and through continuous change — the briefest interruptions which make it intermittent have escaped all sensible observation, at least up to the present. Common opinion, which follows what the senses present, could not even suspect these interruptions. Philosophers themselves did not suspect them because their reflection had not offered them any reason to do so. Later, motion was denied simply to avoid the embarrassment it caused philosophical systems, a fact which is not without its importance. But the problem was not solved; the appearance of continuous motion, which was undeniable, remained unexplained. It appeared more of an aberration than of a truth that harmonised with nature. Aristotle refuted the subtle arguments of Zeno without seeing that although they overthrew the continuity of movement, they did not harm movement itself according to its true concept.

The insuperable difficulty therefore that threw the whole field of philosophy into confusion was the following: 'If something continually changes state and each state has no duration of any kind, the thing can neither be conceived nor be an ens.' Peace returned only with the death of philosophy, when barbarism silenced the philosophical schools.
The ancient Ionians, who were limited to the study of nature and had not yet risen to the heights of metaphysics, were unaware of this great difficulty. Instead of finding the concept of continuous movement difficult, they supposed that life and intelligence must consist in continuous movement. Aristotle attributes this crude opinion to Thales, and after him, to Diogenes, Heraclitus and Alcmeon, in this passage:

Between the first Ionians and their successors however there is a great divergence. Among the latter, Heraclitus, a compatriot of Thales, had already heard about the Italian metaphysicians' opposition to continuous motion. On the one hand he saw the difficulty of admitting that what moves is an ens, and on the other he was unable to relinquish the Ionian opinion that everything moves — his language became so obscure that he was nicknamed (*). He granted that all things lay between ens and non-ens, and were continuously composed and decomposed, as we see in these two opinions preserved by Heraclides Ponticus in his work, The Allegories of Homer . The first is: 'Both gods and humans are mortal; as mortal they live out (they are or make) their death; as dying (they are or make) their life'; the second, 'We step and do not step into the same rivers; WE ARE AND ARE NOT.' This seems to mean that when human beings return to their origins, they are changed into gods and thus live the life of gods who are the origins. Becoming human, on the other hand, they acquire human life, and with this bring about the death of the gods because they cease to be origins. The second alludes to the perpetual transition of things, which this philosopher supposes (*).(195) It is clear therefore that Hegel's system, which has BECOMING as its principle, was obviously derived from Heraclitus' 'We are and are not'. But 'We are and are not' is a contradiction and therefore repugnant to ens; it necessarily destroys ens, whose origin is now nothing! This crazy, absurd system, if it can be called system, has been dubbed, not inappropriately, NIHILISM.(196)

1366. How then did the minds of these pseudo-philosophers arrive at such absurdities by which thought destroys the universe? By starting from two common concepts, from two prejudices unworthy of philosophy: 1. movement is continuous; 2. sensism.
Experience certainly tells us that all bodies move. Granted therefore 1. that all bodies move and nothing stays still, 2. that the movement is continuous, and 3. that nothing is known except through feeling and that, as a consequence of the principle of sensism, the only entia that fall under our perception and knowledge are bodies, then all known entia are continuously changing and their states have no endurance whatsoever: they ARE NOT but continuously BECOME. Now that which becomes is not; therefore no entia exist in the universe . This is Hegelian nihilism , which is highly logical in deducing consequences, but basely defective in its uncritical acceptance of the false principles on which it is based.

1367. Today, modern physicists accept that the whole corporeal world is in movement; we need only read Boyle's book to be convinced of that. But what I find strange is that Leibniz's great, energetic mind accepted the continuity of movement without even suspecting the insuperable difficulties involved, or glimpsing its most unfortunate consequences. I think this was the effect of his vivid imagination, which readily furnished him with hypotheses. He embraced these so willingly and impetuously that he often missed links in the chain of his reasoning.(197)

1368. But let us return to the debates of the ancient philosophers. They sailed between two hazards. On the one hand, the opinion that all things were in continuous change was driven forward by the invincible logic of Heraclitus and came to grief on the obvious absurdity that anything moving in this way does not exist. This great dialectician was hounded by opponents whose principle was: 'There is no ens without duration'. On the other hand, to deny motion (whose concept seemed at that time to involve the idea of continuity) and consequently continual generation and destruction of beings which fall under our senses, meant at least the renuntiation of common sense, a most authoritative judge. More probably, though, such denial would incur mockery and derision. The early philosophers of Mileto thus accepted continuous change and unsuspectingly followed the appearance of the senses, like the commonalty. But then came Parmenides who established the principle proffered by the idea of ens, 'That which has no duration does not exist'. With this principle to hand, he took to task those who thought that sensible phenomena were truths. Parmenides asserted that reason alone, the only potency whose object is truth, must be followed:

Although Parmenides' argument was insoluble, it was not accepted for long, partly because he drew some extraordinary consequences from it, and partly because it was repugnant to the senses and the opinion of the multitude. People preferred to deny every truth and espouse scepticism and nihilism. Thus philosophy fell into the hands of the coarsest of sophists, of whom Protagoras was the most famous.

After Parmenides it became impossible for anyone with understanding to accept that what is perpetually subject to changes is an ens. Because the senses see only things subject to continuous change, people preferred to deny the existence of all things than to admit that the senses were mistaken in presenting continuous change. This, according to Plato, is the description given by Socrates of Protagoras' system and that of many others:

This quotation from Plato is important because it tells us that:

1.Parmenides, having formed the opinion that what exists must as an ens have the essential property of immobility and duration, denied generation and movement [App ., no. 12].

2.Except for a few of his first followers, he alone held this opinion.(202)

3.The philosophers who followed him could not on the one hand deny that duration is an essential property of an ens, and on the other did not want to deny continuous change, that is, generation and movement. Lacking the drive to rise above the senses and oppose common sense which accepted continuous change, they were forced to deny ens, that is, to deny that anything truly exists, and fell into nihilism.

4.Denying the existence of anything was a blow to that very common sense for the sake of which they had believed in continuous change. Hence, Protagoras and his fellow sophists, after deducing the extreme consequences of their system, were forced to hide from the commonalty. A few lines earlier in Theaetetus , Plato says that Protagoras spoke in two ways: to his closest followers he openly declared himself a sceptic and nihilist; to others he talked ambiguously to conceal such a repugnant absurdity.(203)

5.Finally we learn that Plato was the first to attempt to show expressly how Parmenides' teaching (if a thing is to exist it must endure) could be held without denying common sense about continuous movement. Things that ARE (ideas) could be accepted together with other things that BECOME (things in flux which have in themselves continuous change). However, not even he could solve the problem of this very curious mystery that some things become and are not. He did not see that continuity of change, which causes such great difficulty, was a false supposition, unsupported by any reason and accepted gratuitously as a result of phenomenal illusion [App ., no. 13]. And I see no evidence that he saw that the continuum is in fact rooted in the simplicity and unity of the sentient principle.

1369. Moreover, simply by reading the fragments we have of Parmenides, we can easily see that they contain nothing about the doctrine of ideas as it has come to us from Plato whose Parmenides seems to lead to the same conclusion. Socrates is the first to introduce the argument about species or ideas into the dialogue when he discusses the matter with Zeno, a disciple of Parmenides.(204) Zeno and his master seem to show some contempt for the formidable reasoning of the young Socrates. The fragments of Parmenides' poem definitely indicate three systems: 1. that which accepts only ens (the Eleatic system); 2. that which accepts only non-ens, that is, sensible things subject to continuous change (an opinion widespread in Ionian philosophy and ultimately the system of Protagoras and the sophists); and 3. that which accepts both ens and non-ens (Plato, Aristotle and their followers, who attempted a reconciliation between what is eternal and what is generable). At the beginning of his poem, Parmenides speaks of the first two systems as the principal and most precise, and the only well-defined systems at his time:

He then subdivides the second way, whose characteristic is to admit non-ens, into two, that is, the system of those who admit only non-ens and deny ens, and of those who claim that non-ens can be admitted simultaneously with ens:

Parmenides is describing popular, common sense which, because it admits simultaneously that which endures and does not endure, trusts the senses. It makes no distinction at all between that which truly is and that which, through continuous flux, only appears to be so.

1370. The Eleatic teaching however does not come from a single principle but from the two following principles: 1. that which continuously changes and does not endure is not ens, and 2. ens cannot come from nothing.
So far I have spoken about all the teaching Parmenides deduced from the first principle, a teaching which shows that the sensible world, because continuously changeable (as everybody supposed), was appearance, non-ens.

1371. From the second principle he deduced other properties of ens: it is eternal , necessary , the all (because nothing could be outside it) and the universe which was called 'BEING, one and unmoved.'(207) In a word, he deduced all the pantheism of enophanes. We can see therefore what he had taken from his master and what he had added himself: directly from Xenophanes came the teaching deduced from the principle a nihilo nihil fit [nothing is made from nothing]; the teaching about the necessary duration of ens was apparently his own, as we can surmise from the fragments we have of these two philosophers, and particularly from Aristotle's book, Xenophanes , Zeno and Gorgias .

Indeed, the sole principle that ens must endure , that is, be in continuous change, does not in any way allow us to draw the consequence that there is a single ens, eternal , the all , etc. On the other hand, if we are to demonstrate that several entia exist in fact, we must prove that sensible things have duration. To do this, we must overcome deeply ingrained prejudice about the continuity of motion, or more generally about continuous change, which is what I have tried to do.(208)

Notes

(189) Phys ., 1, f. 25.

(190) In Timaeo , bk. 1.

(191) (*).

(192) Phys ., 1, f. 34.

(193) (*), which Bessarion translsates as Nec dici ore potest, nostra nec mente revolvi. Quod nihil est (Adv. Plat. Calumn , 2).

(194) Arist., De Anima , bk. 1. (*) comes from the verb (*), 'I run', which in its poetic form is (*). This origin highlights the astrolatry of the first settlers in Greece.

(195) Plato, Cratyl ., ed. Bipont. p. 267. — According to Plato in theSophist , Heraclitus stated that 'an ens is always dissipation and reconciliation' or as Ficinus translates, 'What is breaking up always comes together' (dissidens semper congreditur ).

(196) Sextus Empiricus reports that Democritus refers to a certain Xeniades of Corinth, whose dates are unknown. This Xeniades was precisely of the opinion that everything came from non-ens and continuously returned to non-ens (he was thus one of the first authors of nihilism(*) (Sext. Emp., Adv. Math ., 7: 53, 388-389; Pyrrho, Hypot ., 2: 18.

(197) For example, to defend Locke against the Cartesian opinion that 'the soul always thinks', Leibniz said, 'I maintain that a substance cannot naturally be inactive, and even that there are no bodies without movement' (Nouveaux essais sur l'Intendement humain etc. bk. 1). It is true that no substance can be inactive, in so far as it necessarily has at least a primal, immanent act. To add that 'there are no bodies without movement' is a fatal step. If there were such bodies, it would be a truth of experience but never a consequence of the principle, because 1. movement of bodies is not a first, immanent act, relative to which alone the principle is true; and 2. movement cannot be said to be an action of bodies that are moved, but are not movers. The principle of movement has to be sought elsewhere, as we saw earlier, even though movement once imparted is communicated from one body to another according to certain laws. Hence Leibniz jumps from the metaphysical principle of the activity of substances to the entirely empirical necessity that bodies move.

(198) Cf. Karsten, vv. 52, 56. Simplicius (In Phys ., 1, f. 7) thinks that Parmenides, when speaking about those who accepted the simultaneity of being and non-being, was attacking Leucippus who posited two conjoint elements as the principles of things: atoms , which he called being , and the void , which he called non-being .

(199) It is clear that Protagoras generalises what applies to corporeal, feelable things, and applies it to any ens whatsoever. He thus constructs an ontology which says nothing about the appurtenances of every ens or the essence of ens, but only about the appurtenances of a special ens which is phenomenal, relative, corporeal and sensible. This kind of sensist ontology is still deeply engrained in minds, and is the source of all modern errors, of all false systems and of all impediments to the progress of legitimate, true philosophy.

(200) Cf. Sturz, v. 34.

(201) Theaetetus , 69-70, ed. Bipont.

(202) It is extraordinary that Plato makes no mention of Anaxagoras. He says, with characteristic Attic irony, that all wise men (*), so-called to distinguish them from philosophers (*), upheld the nihilism of Protagoras. Yet Anaxagoras was the first to admit the unity and simplicity of the mind ((*), Fragm ., ed. Schaubac., p. 110). Plato's silence on Anaxagoras was perhaps due to the fact that Anaxagoras did not sufficiently develop his concept, or did not deal strictly speaking with the general, ontological question raised by Parmenides.

(203) NE, vol. 2, 1127-1131.

(204) Page 76 ss., ed. Bipont.

(205) Cf. Karsten, vv. 33-38.

(206) Vv. 45-51. Although Simplicius presents the passage in the sequence shown, a few lines seem to be missing between verses 44 and 45.

(207) (*).

(208) Aristotle attributes the Eleatics' error to their having seen only that which is ens per se , which is one, and not having distinguished between simple ens (simpliciter ens , (*) and potential ens (*), between ens in potency (*) and ens in act (*). His argument however is a vicious circle. The Eleatics did not admit these distinctions, precisely because they were establishing (or thought they were establishing) the absolute unicity of ens. Not even Aristotle therefore could destroy their arguments because he himself 1. held the continuity of change in nature, without suspecting that it had to be rejected, and 2. did not know that the first cause could not produce transient acts in itself, but of necessity produced them outside itself. This was creation, a concept which really destroys Xenophanes' principle.