Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
C. THE ELEATIC SCHOOL.
The Pythagorean philosophy has not yet got the speculative form of expression for the Notion. Numbers are not pure Notion, but Notion in the form of ordinary idea or sensuous perception, and hence a mixture of both. This expression of absolute essence in what is a pure Notion or something thought, and the movement of the Notion or of Thought, is that which we find must come next, and this we discover in the Eleatic school. In it we see thought becoming free for itself; and in that which the Eleatics express as absolute essence, we see Thought grasp itself in purity, and the movement of Thought in Notions. In the physical philosophy we saw movement represented as an objective movement, as an origination and passing away. The Pythagoreans similarly did not reflect upon these Notions, and also treated their essence, Number, as fleeting. But since alteration is now grasped in its highest abstraction as Nothing, this objective movement changes into a subjective one, comes over to the side of consciousness, and existence becomes the unmoved. We here find the beginning of dialectic, _i.e._ simply the pure movement of thought in Notions; likewise we see the opposition of thought to outward appearance or sensuous Being, or of that which is implicit to the being-for-another of this implicitness, and in the objective existence we see the contradiction which it has in itself, or dialectic proper. When we reflect in anticipation on how the course of pure thought must be formed, we find (_α_) that pure thought (pure Being, the One) manifests itself immediately in its rigid isolation and self-identity, and everything else as null; (_β_) that the hitherto timid thought—which after it is strengthened, ascribes value to the “other” and constitutes itself therefrom—shows that it then grasps the other in its simplicity and even in so doing shows its nullity; (_γ_) finally, Thought manifests the other in the manifold nature of its determinations. We shall see this in the development and culture of the Eleatics in history. These Eleatic propositions still have interest for Philosophy, and are moments which must necessarily there appear.
Xenophanes, Parmenides, Melissus and Zeno are to be reckoned as belonging to this school. Xenophanes may be regarded as the founder of it; Parmenides is supposed to have been his pupil, and Melissus, and especially Zeno, are called the pupils of Parmenides. In fact, they are to be taken together as forming the Eleatic school; later on it lost the name, being then called Sophistic, and its locality was transferred to Greece proper. What Xenophanes began, Parmenides and Melissus developed further, and similarly Zeno perfected what these two taught. Aristotle (Metaph. I. 5) characterizes the first three thus: “Parmenides seems to comprehend the one as Notion (_κατὰ τὸν λόγον_), Melissus as matter (_κατὰ τὴν ὕλην_); hence the former says that it is limited (_πεπερασμένον_) and the latter that it is unlimited (_ἄπειρον_). But Xenophanes, who was the first of them to express the theory of the One, made the matter no plainer (_διεσαφήνισεν_), nor did he deal with either of these aspects (_φύσεως_), but looking into the heavens”—as we say, into the blue—“said, God is the One. Xenophanes and Melissus are on the whole less civilized (_μικρὸν ἀγροικότεροι_); Parmenides, however, is more acute (_μᾶλλον βλέπων_).” There is less to say of Xenophanes and Melissus, and what has come to us from the latter in particular—in fragments and derived from the sayings of others—is still in a state of ferment, and in his case there is least knowledge obtainable. On the whole, philosophic utterances and Notions are still poor, and it was in Zeno that Philosophy first attained to a purer expression of itself.
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