Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays Collected Works, Volume Two · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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Whereas in every word of Heraclitus are expressed the pride and the majesty of truth, but of truth caught by intuitions, not scaled by the rope-ladder of Logic, whereas in sublime ecstasy he beholds but does not espy, discerns but does not reckon, he is contrasted with his contemporary _Parmenides,_ a man likewise with the type of a prophet of truth, but formed as it were out of ice and not out of fire, and shedding around himself cold, piercing light. Parmenides once had, probably in his later years, a moment of the very purest abstraction, undimmed by any reality, perfectly lifeless; this moment--un-Greek, like no other in the two centuries of the Tragic Age--the product of which is the doctrine of "Being," became a boundary-stone for his own life, which divided it into two periods; at the same time however the same moment divides the pre-Socratic thinking into two halves, of which the first might be called the Anaximandrian, the second the Parmenidean. The first period in Parmenides' own philosophising bears still the signature of Anaximander; this period produced a detailed philosophic-physical system as answer to Anaximander's questions. When later that icy abstraction-horror caught him, and the simplest proposition treating of "Being" and "Not-Being" was advanced by him, then among the many older doctrines thrown by him upon the scrap heap was also his own system. However he does not appear to have lost all paternal piety towards the strong and well-shapen child of his youth, and he saved himself therefore by saying: "It is true there is only one right way; if one however wants at any time to betake oneself to another, then my earlier opinion according to its purity and consequence alone is right." Sheltering himself with this phrase he has allowed his former physical system a worthy and extensive space in his great poem on Nature, which really was to proclaim the new discernment as the only signpost to truth. This fatherly regard, even though an error should have crept in through it, is a remainder of human feeling, in a nature quite petrified by logical rigidity and almost changed into a thinking-machine.
Parmenides, whose personal intercourse with Anaximander does not seem incredible to me, and whose starting from Anaximander's doctrine is not only credible but evident, had the same distrust for the complete separation of a world which only is, and a world which only becomes, as had also caught Heraclitus and led to a denying of "Being" altogether. Both sought a way out from that contrast and divergence of a dual order of the world. That leap into the Indefinite, Indefinable, by which once for all Anaximander had escaped from the realm of Becoming and from the empirically given qualities of such realm, that leap did not become an easy matter to minds so independently fashioned as those of Heraclitus and Parmenides; first they endeavoured to walk as far as they could and reserved to themselves the leap for that place, where the foot finds no more hold and one has to leap, in order not to fall. Both looked repeatedly at that very world, which Anaximander had condemned in so melancholy a way and declared to be the place of wanton crime and at the same time the penitentiary cell for the injustice of Becoming.
Contemplating this world Heraclitus, as we know already, had discovered what a wonderful order, regularity and security manifest themselves in every Becoming; from that he concluded that the Becoming could not be anything evil and unjust. Quite a different outlook had Parmenides; he compared the qualities one with another, and believed that they were not all of the same kind, but ought to be classified under two headings. If for example he compared bright and dark, then the second quality was obviously only the _negation_ of the first; and thus he distinguished positive and negative qualities, seriously endeavouring to rediscover and register that fundamental antithesis in the whole realm of Nature. His method was the following: He took a few antitheses, _e.g.,_ light and heavy, rare and dense, active and passive, and compared them with that typical antithesis of bright and dark: that which corresponded with the bright was the positive, that which corresponded with the dark the negative quality. If he took perhaps the heavy and light, the light fell to the side of the bright, the heavy to the side of the dark; and thus "heavy" was to him only the negation of "light," but the "light" a positive quality.
This method alone shows that he had a defiant aptitude for abstract logical procedure, closed against the suggestions of the senses. The "heavy" seems indeed to offer itself very forcibly to the senses as a positive quality; that did not keep Parmenides from stamping it as a negation. Similarly he placed the earth in opposition to the fire, the "cold" in opposition to the "warm," the "dense" in opposition to the "rare," the "female" in opposition to the "male," the "passive" in opposition to the "active," merely as negations: so that before his gaze our empiric world divided itself into two separate spheres, into that of the positive qualities--with a bright, fiery, warm, light, rare, active-masculine character--and into that of the negative qualities. The latter express really only the lack, the absence of the others, the positive ones. He therefore described the sphere in which the positive qualities are absent as dark, earthy, cold, heavy, dense and altogether as of feminine-passive character. Instead of the expressions "positive" and "negative" he used the standing term "existent" and "non-existent" and had arrived with this at the proposition, that, in contradiction to Anaximander, this our world itself contains something "existent," and of course something "non-existent." One is not to seek that "existent" outside the world and as it were above our horizon; but before us, and everywhere in every Becoming, something "existent" and active is contained.
With that however still remained to him the task of giving the more exact answer to the question: What is the Becoming? and here was the moment where he had to leap, in order not to fall, although perhaps to such natures as that of Parmenides, even any leaping means a falling. Enough! we get into fog, into the mysticism of _qualitates occultæ,_ and even a little into mythology. Parmenides, like Heraclitus, looks at the general Becoming and Not-remaining and explains to himself a Passing only thus, that the "Non-Existent" bore the guilt. For how should the "Existent" bear the guilt of Passing? Likewise, however, the Originating, i.e., the Becoming, must come about through the assistance of the "Non-Existent"; for the "Existent" is always there and could not of itself first originate and it could not explain any Originating, any Becoming. Therefore the Originating, the Becoming as well as the Passing and Perishing have been brought about by the negative qualities. But that the originating "thing" has a content, and the passing "thing" loses a content, presupposes that the positive qualities--and that just means that very content--participate likewise in both processes. In short the proposition results: "For the Becoming the 'Existent' as well as the 'Non-Existent' is necessary; when they co-operate then a Becoming results." But how come the "positive" and the "negative" to one another? Should they not on the contrary eternally flee one another as antitheses and thereby make every Becoming impossible? Here Parmenides appeals to a _qualitas occulta,_ to a mystic tendency of the antithetical pairs to approach and attract one another, and he allegorises that peculiar contrariety by the name of Aphrodite, and by the empirically known relation of the male and female principle. It is the power of Aphrodite which plays the matchmaker between the antithetical pair, the "Existent" and the "Non-Existent." Passion brings together the antagonistic and antipathetic elements: the result is a Becoming. When Desire has become satiated, Hatred and the innate antagonism again drive asunder the "Existent" and the "Non-Existent"--then man says: the thing perishes, passes.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.