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Erwin Tegtmeier
Parmenides’ Problem of Becoming and Its Solution
From Plato to the present, the predominant view has been that Parmenides’ problem of
becoming arose from a misconception of being and/or knowing. However, I will try to
show that the problem is genuine and remains unsolved without a fundamental change in
our common notion of becoming. Moreover, I will plead for a return to Parmenides’ strict
concept of being which excludes any kind of non-being, of non-existence. Bringing in non-
existence is usually implicit and loose, especially with respect to the passage of time. It
was Parmenides’ eminent achievement to attend to it and to take it seriously. His
successors, Plato and Aristotle, saw no other way than to reject the strict concept of being
and to acknowledge some kind of semi-existence.
The strict concept is to be distinguished from the marks of being (timelessness, continuity,
indivisibility). Parmenides derives them from his main conclusions (the impossibility of
becoming, change, and plurality). Unlike the strict concept of being, the marks of being
have been undeservedly influential. In Plato the influence is obvious. But even in the
empiricist antipode to the rationalist Parmenides, in Aristotle, it is there despite his
dismissal of Parmenides, and by no means peripherally. At least in the Metaphysics the
central conception of being proper (ousia) is Parmenidian. Ousia is choriston, i.e., separate
from time and change, it is permanent (to a certain extent, at least). Think also of God’s
role as model existent in European metaphysics which he plays because of his eternity and
inalterability.
I. The Problem
ontology which led me to appreciate his arguments, though not his conclusions. I find in
the first main part, the truth section (B2 to B8,51), four arguments against becoming which
I want to call the ontological, the logical, the epistemological and the causal argument.
1 cf. e.g. S.Austin:Parmenides. New Haven/London 1986, D.Gallop: Parmenides of Elea. Toronto/London
1970, E.Heitsch: Parmenides. München 1974, A.P.D.Mourelatos: The Route of Parmenides. New
Haven/London 1970
2
thought , Kahn, for any object of knowledge , Verdenius, for the universe . Now, in the
2 3 4
Greek sentence there is no subject at all, not even a pronoun. But that is a possibility of
Greek grammar not available in English, which does not rule out a semantic subject. My
reason for following Fränkel’s view that there is no subject to be provided has to do with
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the role of the respective sentences. They are methodological slogans rather than
assertions.
What then do the methodological recommendations amount to? The answer I want to
submit takes a clue from fragment 4. The position of this fragment is uncertain and the
second part of it seems in one respect to fit better into the opinion-section, i.e., after
fragment 8. But the first part can be understood to continue fragment 3, which states that
what is knowable, is and that what is, is knowable. Fragment 4 responds to doubts about
the knowability of all things by pointing out that mind apprehends (noein) things which are
not present and cannot be known by perception.
Now, ”to be present” has both a temporal and a spatial sense. Likewise, ”to be near a
subject”. And mind is able to apprehend not only the spatially distant and non-present, but
also the temporally distant and non-present. However, there is a common conviction,
seemingly shared by Parmenides, that the temporally non-present does not exist. This
means that mental acts which have non-present (i.e., past or future) objects, have non-
existent objects. If we take becoming into account, we have many objects of mental acts
which exist and do not exist, which are taken to exist at certain times and to be non-
existent at other times. That, I would suggest, is what Parmenides calls the third route
wavering between being and non-being. The second way warned against first is
presumably the willingness to admit non-existent things, past things of which it is taken to
be true that they are not and cannot be. I submit that the route recommended is to avoid
strictly anything non-existent and to realise that what exists cannot be non-existent, e.g., by
passing away. Parmenides' deep insight, lost or obscured by most of his successors, is just
to take the customary thoughtless assumption of non-existents as, e.g. past and future
things seriously and to mind their non-existence. He saw that what does not exist cannot in
any way contribute to what does exist, it simply does not fit into the world.
I think Parmenides’ central thesis is this: the non-existent must have no status in a science
of ontology and hence the temporal has to be excluded. The common world-outlook
(doxa), of which Parmenides offers an improved systematisation in the second main
section of his poem may, nevertheless, occupy itself with it. That is why it is contrasted to
truth (aletheia).
There is an influential paper by Kahn, which advocates that Parmenides’ first route is
guided by the principle that what we know is always an actual state of affairs. Therefore,
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the “is” does not apply to things, as most scholars supposed before, and as I do, but to
states of affairs. Correspondingly, the second route would be to acknowledge non-actual
states of affairs. Kahn thinks that we do so when we conceive of coming into being from
non-being. But, what would be the non-actual state of affairs, if b came into being? The
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state of affairs that b does not exists involving existence as a predicate? The assumption of
an existence predicate is highly controversial. Moreover, the question arises, how there can
be a singular state of affairs about b if b does not exist. Does it not presuppose b in order to
be possible? So, it is not advisable to take Parmenides as having started from a thesis
involving states of affairs. Mourelatos, commenting on Kahn’s paper in the same volume,
2 G.E.L.Owen.: Eleatic Questions, in: G.E.L.Owen: Logic, Science, and Dialectic. London 1986, p.15f.
3 Ch.H.Kahn: The Thesis of Parmenides, Review of Metaphysics 22 (1969); p.713
4 W.J.Verdenius: Parmenides - Some Comments on his Poem. Groningen 1942
5 H.Fränkel: Review of W.J.Verdenius: Parmenides- Some Comments on his Poem,in: Classical Philology
41 (1946), p.169
6 op.cit. p.711f.
7 op.cit. p.716
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holds it to be certain that Parmenides’ single being falls under the category of individual 8
and Tugendhat calls it a bad anachronism to attribute to Parmenides the concept of state of
affairs. ’
9
Kahn’s interpretation has the advantage of maintaining the close connection in Parmenides
between ontological thesis and epistemological argument, states of affairs being regarded,
first of all, as truth-conditions, and, at the same time, of offering a rather plausible rationale
of Parmenides’ thesis, namely that knowledge depends on existing states of affairs.
However, the plausibility is weakened by wider ontological considerations. Not every
ontology comprising the category of states of affairs provides for a state of affairs for each
true sentence or belief. In the ontology of the early Wittgenstein (to which Kahn refers),
e.g., there are no states of affairs corresponding to compound, quantified and negative
sentences and beliefs even though they are true. The respective knowledge would
accordingly be knowledge of non-existents. Thus Parmenides’ rejection of the non-existent
is after all not self-evident in Kahn’s version. On the other hand, if Parmenides had his eye
on non-existing facts rather than non-existing things, the claim that we cannot have
knowledge of non-existents would be right provided knowing is taken in the narrow sense
of justified true belief. It seems that other kinds of mental states, such as imagining for
example, can have non-existent objects.
To sum up: in my view Parmenides’ main thesis aims at admitting only existing things into
ontology and at excluding in particular temporally non-present things and things not
completely present.
8 op.cit. p.741
9 s. E.Tugendhat Das Sein und das Nichts, in: V.Klostermann(ed) Durchblicke. Frankfurt 1970, p.138
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from non-being to being seems to exclude the second possibility. In reality it does not. The
emergence of a thing x from another thing y (which existed before x) is compatible with
the transition from the non-existence of x to the existence of x, just because x and y are
diverse. The second premise occurs as 8,11, where there is also an indication that
Parmenides takes it to be a necessary truth.
To sum up, I hold that the ontological and the logical arguments are sound. Later on, after
reconstructing the remaining two arguments, I will discuss Plato’s and Aristotle’s criticism
and their alternatives.
The second premise is also brought forward at the end of fragment 2 against the route of
non-being and in support of the route of being and, hence, also in support of the crucial
premise of the ontological argument, which says that the non-existent has no ontological
status. Here the arguments are interwoven.
The epistemological argument does not go down well with many Parmenides scholars. It is
seen as resulting from a primitive view of mental acts, extending to all kinds of mental acts
what holds only of perception. Fragment 3 pronounces a principle of correspondence
between knowing and being. Some philosophers have taken Parmenides to mean that
thinking and being of something is the same. This would make Parmenides an idealist. It
has to be admitted that the key word “hauto” is ambiguous. However, the usual reading is
that it states a principle of correspondence between the existing and the thinkable.
A similar principle is to be found in the phenomenological movement (most explicitly in
Meinong), namely the principle that every mental act must have an object and that this
object must have ontological status. It derives from the view that mental acts stand in an
intentional relation which has two terms. Gustav Bergmann who shares the principle calls
it principle of presentation .
10
Thus Parmenides’ second premise is not as naive as some interpreters think. They merely
took for granted the nominalistic and conceptualistic doctrine that thinking proper is not
based on the world but flows mainly from reason. This doctrine suggests that some kinds
of thoughts (presumably the more abstract ones such as generalisations or negations) do
not have objective counterparts.
I agree with Parmenides’ critics that the epistemological argument is weaker than the first
two, because its second premise is controversial. At least, the principle of presentation is
not obviously false. Its advocates take into account imagination and false perceptions and
beliefs. And they furnish objects for all acts, including what are traditionally called
judgements, by acknowledging facts or similar entities such as e.g. Meinongian objectives.
It has been frequently noted that Parmenides appeals implicitly to a principle of sufficient
reason. Such a principle may be hard to defend after what has been called “the stochastic
revolution”. The traditional principle “ex nihilo nihil fit” derived from Parmenides is not
self-evident. It implies that any becoming is really change and that the universe has no
beginning. The latter conflicts with recent cosmology.
As to the second branch of Parmenides’ whole argument, the denial of emergence from a
being derives from his extreme monism, i.e., the view that there is only one simple thing.
This view is certainly mistaken. Hence, the argument as a whole and the causal branch of it
are very weak and no challenge of contemporary ontology. The same seems to be true of
Parmenides’ reasoning against pluralism. It does indeed depend on misunderstandings
which I cannot go into here. But as I pointed out, that is definitely not the case with the
ontological and the logical argument.
V. Aristotle’s Criticism
Aristotle makes the ambiguity of being his crucial point. And he proposes in Physics
(185a) that Parmenides’ arguments turn out to be untenable, as soon as one takes that
ambiguity into account. Now, the ambiguities which Aristotle elaborates on (in
Metaphysics and Categories) are further differentiations of the predicative and the
sameness-“is” and do not concern existence at all. Aristotle’s categorical differentiations
are irrelevant to Parmenides’ problem of becoming and to the ontological argument, even if
one takes Arisotle, as many scholars do, to be concerned with existence and conceiving his
categories as kinds or ways of existence. This is because becoming cannot be seen as a
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transition from one category to another category. Only Aristotle’s modes of being,
potentiality and actuality, are applicable in an analysis of becoming. However, they do not
occur in Physics. In Metaphysics (1048) and On Generation and Corruption (317a)
Aristotle applies them to becoming. Emergence is taken to be the transition from matter in
the mode of potentiality to a substance in the mode of actuality. Aristotle associates
potentiality with non-being (On Generation and Corruption 317b, Metaphysics 1032a).
But since matter and the potential in general has a certain ontological status, even though
having no form, it is unintelligible. So it is best rated as semi-being or semi-existent. 12
Aristotle’s analysis of becoming seems calculated to block the ontological and the causal
argument by introducing potential entities. And he is widely credited with having found the
final solution to Parmenides’ problem of becoming. But what he does is just to reject the
problem rather than solve it. He grants ontological status to something not fully in
11 This is not the interpretation, e.g., of J.Owens, see The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian
“Metaphysics. Toronto 1978, p.309
12 Recently, U.Meixner turned the Aristotelian concept of actuality against Parmenides and accused him of
using the term “being” ambiguously, partly in the sense “actual” and partly in a wider sense. In a comment
on Meixner’s paper I argued that the distinction has no place in Parmenides’ ontology. See U.Meixner:
“Parmenides und die Logik der Existenz” Grazer Philosophische Studien 47 (1994), and E.Tegtmeier:
“Meixner über Parmenides” Grazer Philosophische Studien 51 (1996).
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existence. Thus he simply walks Parmenides’ second route. Aristotle is not afraid of
non--being, mentioning only in passing that the oldest wise men were (317b).
In Aristotle the difficulties are more external than internal. An application exhibits the
implausibility of his conception of semi-existence. Consider his example of the block of
wood designed to become a statue. That the block is a potential but no actual statue,
obviously, does not diminish its existence. As was noticed already, it is not clear whether
Aristotle wants to grade existence here or merely distinguish potential and actual
13 This is also one of the main points of Brentano’s ontology, s. F.Brentano: Kategorienlehre. Hamburg
1974, Part 1 Chap.III
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Whatever exists does so independently of its duration and temporal location. There is no
past. present and future existence but only existence simpliciter. Nor is there existence
related to time points. There are no time points, no temporal absoluta.. Like Russell I am
convinced that temporal absolutism is wrong, that time is nothing but a group of relations
such as ‘is simultaneous’, ‘is earlier than’, ‘lasts as long as’ and ‘lasts longer than’. Date
and duration are relational. They base on relations to events which are used as measuring
standards. To the group of temporal relations belongs also the relation of temporal part.
Everything which changes has temporal parts by virtue of this relation or rather by virtue
of the respective relational facts.
My ontological analysis implies that becoming is not an existential transition, but not
necessarily that it is no transition at all. A transition is a temporal succession of opposite
states. Temporal succession bases on the relation ‘earlier than’(ER), which is a two-place
relation of the first order and hence holds between individual objects only including
14 For this I argued in detail in E.Tegtmeier: Zeit und Existenz.Parmenideische Meditationen. Tübingen
1997
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The transition or change of an lamp l from red to green colour bases on the temporal
succession of the temporal parts of l, l1 and l2. The transition can be represented
symbolically b ER(l1,l2)&Rl1&Gl2, where ”R” stands for the colour red and ”G” for the
colour green. Now, becoming is an extraordinary transition. It is no change of properties or
relations because a persisting object is missing. So an object of comparison c seems
idispensible in order to have a temporal succession corresponding to the becoming of an
object b. In the case of an emerging b the object of comparison c has to begin earlier than b
and in the case of b’s passing away the object of comparison has to last longer than b. The
emergence of b would then be the following fact: ER(c1,c2)&Ø($x)TP(x,b)&SI(x,c1)&
($y)TP(y,b)&SI(y,c2), where TP is the relation ‘temporal part’ and SI the relation of
simultaneity. The transition thus is represented by a sentence which contains what its
usually called the “existential quantifier”. So, it seems to imply existence. But the term is
misleading. The facts in question are numerical rather than existential. By the logical
phrase “there is no” expresses in my view that the number of entities of the kind specified
is not greater than zero .16
Now, the sketched relational conception of becoming may appear doubtful and leading to
an infinite regress. If there is no eternal object, i.e. no object of infinite duration in both
directions, each becoming requires an earlier or later becoming. And most likely there is no
such eternal process. However, the threatening regress reveals only the circumstance that
the earliest and the latest object (if there are such objects) would mark the beginning and
end of time itself. And the possibility of a beginning and end of time is entirely in
accordance with the relational view of time.
15 For my ontology and my conception of temporal parts which differs from Quine’s see E.Tegtmeier:
Grundzüge einer kategorialen Ontologie. Freiburg 1992, §4 ,8, 9 and E.Tegtmeier: Zeit und Existenz
§20,21,34,35.
16 For the relation between number and existence see E.Tegtmeier: Zeit und Existenz, §20
11
Bibliography
Austin,S.:Parmenides. New Haven/London 1986
17 See Tegtmeier “Der Hyperdynamismus in der Ontologie der Zeit” Logos 2 (1994). My view of time is
similar to Russel’s and to the so-called new tenseless theory of time which, however, is mostly ontologically
unsatisfactory and I would deny that there is an opposition between temporal relations and temporal
becoming. See Oaklander: Temporal Relations and Temporal Becoming 1984 and Oaklander and Smith: The
New Theory of Time. New Haven/London 1994.
12
Meixner,U.: “Parmenides und die Logik der Existenz”, in: Grazer Philosophische Studien
47 (1994), S.59-75
Oaklander,L.N. and Smith,Qu.(eds) The New Theory of Time. Yale University Press: New
Haven/London 1994
Tugendhat,E.: Das Sein und das Nichts, in: V.Klostermann(ed) Durchblicke. Klostermann:
Frankfurt 1970, p.132-161