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What There Is:

Metaphysics

he central topic of metaphysics is ontology: the study of Being. The

T word ‘ontology’ derives from the Greek word ‘on’ (in the plural
‘onta’), which is the present participle of ‘einai’, the verb ‘to be’. In
Greek, as in English, a deWnite article can be placed in front of a participle
to mark out a class of people or things: as when we talk of the living or of
the dying, meaning all the people who are now living or all the people who
are now dying. The founder of ontology was Parmenides, and he deWned
his topic by placing the deWnite article ‘to’ in front of the participle ‘on’. ‘To
on’, literally ‘the being’, on the model of ‘the living’, means: all that is. It is
customary to translate the expression into English as ‘Being’ with an initial
capital. Without a capital, the English word ‘being’ has, in philosophy, two
uses, one corresponding to the Greek participle and one to the Greek
inWnitive. A being, we can say, using the participle, is an individual that is;
whereas being (using the verbal noun) is, as it were, what any individual
being is engaged in. The totality of individual beings make up Being.
These rather tedious grammatical distinctions need making, because
neglect of them can lead, and has led, even great philosophers into
confusion. In order to understand Parmenides, one further important
distinction has to be made: between being and existence.
‘To be’ in English, and its equivalent in Greek, can certainly mean ‘to
exist’. Thus, Wordsworth tells us, ‘She lived unknown, and few could
know j When Lucy ceased to be.’ In English the use is largely poetic, and
it is not natural to say such things as ‘The pyramids are, but the Colossus of
Rhodes is not’, when we mean that the pyramids are still in existence,
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while the Colossus is not. But analogous statements would be quite natural
in ancient Greek, and this sense of ‘be’ is certainly involved in Parmenides’
talk of Being. All that there is, all that exists, is included in Being.
However, the Greek verb ‘to be’ occurs not only in sentences such as
‘Troy is no more’ but also in sentences of many diVerent kinds, such
as ‘Helen is beautiful’, ‘Aphrodite is a goddess’, ‘Achilles is brave’, and so on
through all the diVerent modes that Aristotle was to dignify as categories.
For Parmenides, Being is not just that which exists, but that of which any
sentence containing ‘is’ is true. Equally, being is not just existing (being,
period) but being anything whatever: being hot or being cold, being earth
or being water, and so on. Thus interpreted, Being is a realm both richer
and more puzzling than the totality of existents.

Parmenides’ Ontology
Let us now look in detail at some of Parmenides’ mysterious claims,
expressed in his rugged verse, which I have tried to render in an equally
clumsy translation.
What you can call and think must Being be
For Being can, and nothing cannot, be. (DK 28 B6)
The Wrst line (literally: ‘What is for saying and for thinking must be’)
expresses the universality of Being: whatever you can call by any name,
whatever you can think of, must be. Why so? Presumably because if I utter
a name or think a thought, I must be able to answer the question ‘What is it
that you are talking about or thinking of?’ The message of the second line
(literally ‘It is for being be but nothing is not’) is that anything that can be
at all must be something or other; it cannot be just nothing.
The matter becomes clearer when Parmenides, in a later fragment,
introduces a negative notion to correspond to Being.
Never shall this prevail, that Unbeing is;
Rein in your mind from any thought like this. (DK 28 B7, 1–2)
My ‘Unbeing’ represents the negation of Parmenides’ participle (me eonta).
I use the word instead of some formula such as ‘not-being’ because the
context makes clear that Parmenides’ Greek expression, though a perfectly

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Parmenides and Heraclitus, neighbours in Raphael’s School of Athens
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natural one, is meant to designate a polar opposite of Being. If Being is that

of which something or other, no matter what, is true, then Unbeing is
that of which nothing at all is true. And that, surely, is nonsense: not only
can it not exist, it cannot even be thought of.
Unbeing you won’t grasp—it can’t be done—
Nor utter; being thought and being are one.

If we understand ‘Unbeing’ as meaning that to which no predicate can be

attached, then it is surely correct to say that it is something unthinkable. If,
in answer to your question ‘What kind of thing are you thinking of ?’, I say
that it isn’t any kind of thing, you will be puzzled. If, further, I cannot tell
you what it is like, or indeed tell you anything at all about it, you may
justly conclude that I’m not thinking of anything, indeed not really
thinking at all. If we understand Parmenides in this sense, we can agree
that to be thought of and to be go together.
But granting this much, we may still want to protest against the
sweeping claim that being thought and being are one. It may be the case
that if I am to think of X I must be able to attach, in thought, some
predicate to X. But it is not the case that any thought I have about X must
be true: I can think that X is P when X is not P. If we take the dictum in that
way, then it is false: being thought and being true are two very diVerent
things.
Again, we can agree that Unbeing cannot be thought of without
agreeing that what does not exist cannot be thought of. We can think of
Wctional heroes and chimerical beasts who never existed. If it were true that
what does not exist cannot be thought of, we could prove that things exist
simply by thinking of them. Did Parmenides believe we could? Given the
contortions of his language, it is hard to be sure. Some scholars claim that
he confused the ‘is’ of predication (involved in the true claim that Unbeing
cannot be thought of) with the ‘is’ of existence (involved in the false claim
that the non-existent cannot be thought of). It is, I think, more helpful to
say rather that Parmenides always treats ‘to be’—in any of its uses—as a
fully Xedged verb. That is to say, he thinks of ‘being water’ or ‘being air’
as related to ‘being’ in the same way as ‘running fast’ and ‘running slowly’
is related to ‘running’. In a sentence of the form ‘S is P’, instead of thinking
of the ‘is’ as a copula and the ‘P’ as a predicate, he thinks of the ‘is’ as a verb
and the ‘P’ as analogous to an adverb. A person who Wrst runs fast and then

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runs slowly is running all the time. Similarly, for Parmenides, stuV which is
Wrst water and then air goes on be-ing all the time. Change is never from
not-being to being, or vice versa; the most there can ever be is variation of
being.
Interpreting Parmenides in this way helps us to understand how he
draws some very remarkable conclusions from the theses of the universal-
ity of Being and the inconceivability of Unbeing.
One road there is, signposted in this wise:
Being was never born and never dies.
Four-square, unmoved, no end it will allow.
It never was, nor will be; all is now,
One and continuous. How could it be born
Or whence could it be grown? Unbeing?—No—
That mayn’t be said or thought; we cannot go
So far ev’n to deny it is. What need,
Early or late, could Being from Unbeing seed?
Thus it must altogether be or not.
(DK 28 B8. 1–11)
From the principle ‘Nothing can come from nothing’ many philosophers
of diVerent persuasions have drawn the conclusion that the world must
always have existed. Other philosophers, too, have oVered as a supporting
argument that there could be no suYcient reason for a world to come into
existence at one moment rather than another, earlier or later. But Par-
menides’ claim that Being has no beginning and no end takes a much more
sweeping form. Being is not only everlasting, it is not subject to change
(‘four-square, unmoved’) or even to the passage of time (it is all now, and
has no past or future). What could diVerentiate past from present and
future? If it is no kind of being, then time is unreal; if it is some kind of
being, then it is all part of Being. Past, present, and future are all one Being.
By similar arguments Parmenides seeks to show that Being is undivided.
What could separate Being from Being? Being? In that case there is no
division, but continuous Being. Unbeing? In that case any division is unreal
(DK 28 B8. 22–5). We might expect him to argue in a parallel fashion that
Being is unlimited. What could set limits to Being? Unbeing cannot do
anything to anything; and if we imagine that Being is limited by Being,
then Being has not yet reached its limits. Some of Parmenides’ followers
argued thus (Aristotle, GC 1.8. 325a15), but this is not how Parmenides

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himself seems to have seen matters. When he comes to sum up his

teaching, starting from premisses that are by now familiar he reaches a
rather startling conclusion.
To think a thing’s to think it is, no less.
Apart from Being, whate’er we may express
Thought does not reach. Naught is or will be
Beyond Being’s bounds, since Destiny’s decree
Fetters it whole and still. All things are names
Which the credulity of mortals frames—
Birth and destruction, being all or none,
Changes of place, and colours come and gone.
But since a bound is set embracing all
Its shape’s well rounded like a perfect ball.
(DK 28 B8, 34–43)
It is not at all clear how the concept of the universe as a perfect sphere is
either coherent in itself or reconcilable with the rest of Parmenides’
teaching. However that may be, there is a more pressing question. If this
is the nature of Being, uniform, unchanging, immobile, and timeless, what
are we to make of the multiplicity of changing properties that we normally
attribute to items in the world on the basis of sense-experience? These, for
Parmenides, belong to the Way of Seeming. If we want to follow the Way of
Truth, we must keep our minds Wxed on Being.
While Parmenides and his disciples, in Greek Italy, were stressing that
only what is utterly stable is real, Heraclitus, across the seas in Greek Asia,
was stressing that what is real is in total Xux. Heraclitus was given to
speaking in riddles: to express his philosophy of universal change he used
both Wre and water as images. The world is an ever-living Wre, now Xaring
up, now dying down; Wre is the currency into which everything can be
converted just as gold and goods are exchanged for each other (DK 22 B30,
B90). But the world is also an ever-Xowing river. If you step into a river, you
cannot put your feet twice into the same water. Getting rather carried
away by his metaphor, Heraclitus went on to say—if Plato reports him
honestly—that you cannot step twice into the same river (Cra. 402a).
However that may be, he seems undoubtedly to have claimed that all
things are in motion all of the time (Aristotle, Ph. 8. 3. 253b9). If we do not
notice this, it is because of the defects of our senses. For Heraclitus, then, it
is change that is the Way of Truth, and stability that is the Way of Seeming.

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