Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
3. MELISSUS.
There is little to tell about the life of Melissus. Diogenes Laertius (IX. 24) calls him a disciple of Parmenides, but the discipleship is uncertain; it is also said of him that he associated with Heraclitus. He was born in Samos, like Pythagoras, and was besides a distinguished statesman amongst his people. It is said by Plutarch (in Pericle, 26) that, as admiral of the Samians, he gained in battle a victory over the Athenians. He flourished about the 84th Olympiad (444 B.C.). In regard to his philosophy, too, there is little to say. Aristotle, where he mentions him, places him always with Parmenides, as resembling him in mode of thought. Simplicius, writing on Aristotle’s Physics (p. 7 sqq.), has preserved several fragments of his prose writings on Nature, which show the same kind of thoughts and arguments as we find in Parmenides, but, in part, somewhat more developed. It was a question whether the reasoning in which it is shown that change does not exist, or contradicts itself, which, by Aristotle in his incomplete, and, in some parts, most corrupt work on Xenophanes, Zeno, and Gorgias (c. 2.), was ascribed to Xenophanes, did not really belong to Melissus.[57]
“If anything is, it is eternal (_ἀΐδιον_).” Eternity is an awkward word, for it immediately makes us think of time and mingle past and future as an infinite length of time; but what is meant is that _ἀΐδιον_ is the self-identical, supersensuous, unchangeable, pure present, which is without any time-conception. It is, origination and change are shut out; if it commences, it does so out of nothing or out of Being. “It is impossible that anything should arise from the nothing. If everything could have arisen, or could it merely not have been everything eternally, it would equally have arisen out of nothing. For, if everything had arisen, nothing would once have existed. If some were alone the existent out of which the rest sprang, the one would be more and greater. But the more and greater would thus have arisen out of the nothing of itself, for in the less there is not its more, nor in the smaller its greater.” Simplicius makes this note to the Physics of Aristotle (p. 22 b): “No more can anything arise out of the existent, for the existent already is, and thus does not first arise from the existent.”
“As eternal, the existent also is unlimited, since it has no beginning from which it came, nor end in which it ceases. The infinite all is one, for, if there were two or more, they would limit one another,” and thus have a beginning and end. The one would be the nothing of the other and come forth from this nothing. “This one is like itself; for if it were unlike it would no longer be the one that was posited, but many. This one is likewise immovable, inasmuch as it does not move itself, since it does not pass out into anything. In passing out, it would require to do so into what is full or what is empty; it could not be into the full, for that is an impossibility, and just as little could it be into what is empty, for that is the nothing. The one, therefore, is in this way devoid of pain or suffering, not changing in position or form, or mingling with what is different. For all these determinations involve the origination of non-being and passing away of Being, which is impossible.” Thus here again the contradiction which takes place when origination and passing away are spoken of, is revealed.
Now Melissus places opinion in opposition to this truth. The change and multiplicity extinguished in Being appears on the other side, in consciousness, as in what is opinionative; it is necessary to say this if only the negative side, the removal of these moments, the Absolute as destitute of predicate, is laid hold of. “In sensuous perception the opposite is present for us; that is to say, a number of things, their change, their origination and passing away, and their intermingling. Thus that first knowledge must take its place beside this second, which has as much certainty for ordinary consciousness as the first.” Melissus does not seem to have decided for the one or the other, but, oscillating between both, to have limited the knowledge of the truth to the statement that, speaking generally, between two opposite modes of presentation, the more probable opinion is to be preferred, but that what is so preferred is only to be regarded as the stronger opinion, and not as truth. This is what Aristotle says of him.
Since Aristotle, in distinguishing his philosophy from the philosophy of Parmenides, maintains that in the first place Parmenides seems to understand the One as the principle of thought, and Melissus as matter, we must remark that this distinction falls away in pure existence, Being, or the One. Pure matter, as also pure thought (if I am to speak of such a distinction), are not present to Parmenides and Melissus, since they are abrogated; and it must only be in the manner of his expression that one of them—according to Aristotle (Phys. I. 2), on account of his clumsier mode of treatment (_μᾶλλον φορτικός_)—could seem to have conceived of the other sense. If the difference consisted secondly in the fact that Parmenides regarded the one as limited and Melissus as unlimited, this limitation of the one would, in effect, immediately contradict the philosophy of Parmenides; for since limit is the non-being of Being, non-being would thus be posited. But when Parmenides speaks of limit, we see that his poetic language is not altogether exact; limit, however, as pure limit, is just simple Being and absolute negativity, in which all else said and set forth is sublated. Necessity, as this pure negativity and movement within itself, although impassive thought, is absolutely bound to its opposite. In the third place it may be said that Parmenides set forth a concomitant philosophy of opinion or reality, to which Being as existence for thought was thus more opposed than was the case with Melissus.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.