BMCR 2009.03.57, Chiara Robbiano, Becoming Being: On Parmenides'

Chiara Robbiano, Becoming Being: On Parmenides' Transformative
Philosophy.  International Pre-Platonic Studies; v. 5.  Sankt Augustin:
Academia Verlag, 2006.  Pp. 240.  ISBN 9783896653833.  EUR 54.00.


Reviewed by Shaul Tor, St. John's College, Cambridge University
([email protected])
Word count:  3554 words
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Hailed by A.A. Long as "a full scale paradigm shift"[[1]] in
Parmenidean scholarship, R(obbiano)'s provocative monograph displays an
exceptionally original methodology, resulting in some radically
innovative if, I believe, fundamentally problematic theses. Rather than
simply extrapolating from the poem a set of epistemological and
ontological propositions, R. approaches the text from a variety of
literary, rhetorical and dialectical perspectives, and finds in it a
systematic heuristic guide designed to enable and help the audience to
develop the unfamiliar categories and mental attitudes they would
require in order to achieve an understanding of Parmenides' truth. This
understanding, moreover, consists, not merely in the discursive
acceptance of certain doctrines, but in a spiritual or mental
transformation, culminating in the genuine rejection, and consequent
elimination, of the distinction between the human knowing subject and
Being as the object of knowledge. "The unique Being is what one can
grasp, understand and be (at least with one's mind) if one learns a
certain way of looking at reality" (p.208). Although, as I shall argue
below, central aspects of R.'s elaboration of this thesis involve
various difficulties, her insightful, lucid, scholarly and suggestive
discussions will reward close study not only for Parmenidean experts
and specialists in other areas of ancient philosophy, but also for
classicists of all disciplinary persuasions, non-classicists interested
in Parmenides or ancient philosophy and students of comparative
literature or the ancient literature of other cultures (the volume
includes a text and translation of the poem).

What follows will be necessarily selective and so partial. After
offering an overview of the various chapters, I will focus in more
detail on some of what struck me as the more problematic aspects of
R.'s monograph.

In the first, introductory chapter (pp.9-34), R. elucidates the
distinctiveness of her project by identifying both its affinities with
and its divergences from previous scholarship. Developing Long (1996),
she challenges the old prejudice that only with Socrates did philosophy
begin to concern itself with the human observer,[[2]] positing that the
unity of Parmenides' poem consists, not in a particular message, but in
the project of guiding the audience towards a certain transformation.
Perhaps most significantly, R. displaces traditional exegetic norms by
adopting, as the criterion of successful interpretations, the putative
reactions of the audience of Parmenides' poem. Thus, rather than
delimiting the text to a single construal, R. strives to recover as
many as possible of the frames of reference that the poem could have
evoked for its contemporary hermeneutic audience. Drawing on Iser's
notion of 'the implied reader', R. aims "to reconstruct the audience as
it is constructed by the text" (p.28), positing as her yardstick
ideally collaborative and well-informed addressees.  In the second
chapter (pp.35-60), R. explores the frames and expectations raised by
the generic affiliations of Parmenides' epic, hexametric poem with the
verses of Homer, Hesiod and Xenophanes, such as the expectation for a
truthful, authoritative and potentially iconoclastic didactic treatment
of matters of great importance. She analyses both the fulfilments and
the frustrations of these expectations in Parmenides' poem, advancing,
for instance, the interesting suggestion that Parmenides is
revolutionary in claiming to enable his addressees to make themselves
knowledgeable.[[3]]

The third chapter (pp.61-88) focuses on the rhetorical strategies by
which the protagonist of the poem, who focalises the journey in a
first-person narrative, is offered to the audience as a model to
emulate. R. helpfully demonstrates that chre^ and its cognates
delineate what behaviour is possible and appropriate for a given kind
of agent: by receiving him as she does, the goddess intimates why the
traveller, and so the audience, are required to become knowledgeable
concerning both the truth and mortal opinions. In the fourth chapter
(pp.89-120), R. turns to strategies of negative persuasion. The
confused and indecisive mortals who wander along the wrong-ways serve
as anti-models dissuading the audience from adopting these ways, while
the argumentation of B8 undermines traditional explanatory methods such
as cosmogonies and theories of change.[[4]]

In chapter five (pp.121-146), R. analyses the imagery of movement
constructed throughout the poem as a means of helping mortals envisage
their own approach to Being. I found the claim that all the various
kinds of motion in the poem systematically reflect the nature of the
knower's approach to Being the least convincing of R.'s proposals.
Since, on R.'s own account, the poem develops rather diverse images of
motion, the audience would seem to be presented with confusingly mixed
messages: the motion of the journey is linear, but also circular, and,
ultimately, one realises that the journey involved no movement at all.
In chapter six (pp.147-176), perhaps the most successful in the book,
R. demonstrates how, throughout the poem, images of opposition and
division, such as the division between life and death, are overcome and
replaced by those of unity. Dike^, rather than fulfilling its
traditional role of maintaining the balance of the whole by preserving
the boundaries that separate its constituent parts, undoes such
boundaries, sanctioning, for instance, the presence of a living mortal
in Hades. Dike^, Ananke^ and Moira, acting on both Being and the
traveller, protect the integrity of Being with an external boundary
rather than internal ones. Such imagery fosters the construal of a
homogeneous unity that includes both the knowing mind and the Being it
knows.[[5]]

In the seventh chapter (pp.177-199), R. addresses the perennial
question of the relation between the two parts of Parmenides' poem. She
interprets the Doxai as the untrue, untrustworthy but best possible
account of the objects of their inquiry (such as change and
differentiation). Since both involve Not-Being, the Doxai are
themselves appropriate to these objects of inquiry: the admission of
opposites (each being what the other is not) renders the Doxai both
untrustworthy and able to account usefully for certain aspects of our
perceptual experience that the way of truth could never accommodate.
The book closes with a helpful concluding section, offering a synoptic
view of R.'s approach and findings (pp.201-211).

The most daring and innovative result of R.'s methodology is no doubt
her notion of 'focalised monism'.[[6]] Simply put, R. denies that the
Way of Truth expresses an ontology. Rather than teaching his audience
that Being is, say, immobile and ungenerated without further
qualification, Parmenides teaches his audience how to adopt a
particular perspective from which Being is immobile and ungenerated.
The grounds for the rejection of theories of change and
differentiation, for instance, is that such theories could never lead
to certain, trustworthy results: they invariably involve what-is-not,
which one cannot recognise oneself and about which one cannot give
clear indications to others. However, this epistemic inability "does
not say anything about the ontological status of what-is-not as such."
(p.111). Without assuming the non-existence of what-is-not, the
arguments in B8 express rather a program of research: "an assignment
for the mind, not a characteristic of reality tout court" (p.117).
Unifying oneself with Being depends on successfully adopting the
perspective from which Being is a unified whole: "[m]onism becomes, on
this reading, what one can see if one looks in a certain way: one can
learn to see everything as a unity, if one looks from a certain
perspective" (p.129). In this manner, R. claims to have dispelled the
notorious paradoxes of monism: the dialogic setting, involving both
speaker and addressee, no longer implies a duality at odds with the
monism advocated in the course of this conversation, nor does the
possibility of mortal error conflict with the identity of Being and
(self-reflective) cognition (p.129).

This bold interpretation runs into several difficulties. Firstly, R.,
following recent scholarly consensus, contends convincingly that we
would be wrong to isolate existential, predicative and veridical uses
of 'is'. All three senses are inextricably operative in Parmenides' use
of the verb (p.80). By analogy, however, the statement that 'nothing is
not' (B6.2) signifies, inter alia, the non-existence of 'nothing' or
'what-is-not', and not merely that it is "not sensible to look for
something that now is not." (p.110). Indeed, R. inconsistently
presupposes the non-existence of what-is-not when explaining why it
cannot be recognised (p.94). Given R.'s own analysis of 'is',
Parmenides does seem to hold the view that 'it is not the case that
what-is-not is' where 'is' means 'exists, can sustain coherently
predications of attributes, and can be the subject in true
propositions'.

Secondly, R. seems to develop two severally problematic and seemingly
incompatible elaborations of the notion that the ways represent
'perspectives' on reality: she sometimes speaks as if (1) the first way
and the wrong way(s) deal with different objects of inquiry (e.g. what
is changeless and what changes as different aspects of reality), and
sometimes as if (2) they offer different perspectives on the same
object of inquiry (reality as changeless and changing).[[7]] To begin
with (1), R. herself seems to recognise that B8.36f ('nothing else is
or will be apart from Being') indicates the uniqueness and
exhaustiveness of the object of inquiry on the first route (p.171). She
refers in passing to what-is as "everything there is" (p.134, n.362).
More generally, in B8 Parmenides does not engage with statements of the
form 'what does not change is...', but rather of the form 'what is (to
eon) does not change'. The rejection of generation and perishing,
therefore, is not restricted to one class of things (only what one
focuses on in the first route) but extends to all that is (to eon, what
one focuses on in the first route).

As for (2), it seems undeniable that, within the perspective of the
first route, Parmenides formulates statements in which what-is acts as
the subject to which various attributes are predicated. To support her
contention that "[n]o birth and so no death can be attributed to Being
within a trustworthy account" (p.113), R. cites Parmenides' assertion
that 'true trust' has pushed birth and death away (B8.27f.). But this
last assertion is introduced specifically as the justification
(<greek>e)pei/</greek>) of the declarative statement that 'Being is
without beginning and end' (<greek>e)/stin a)/narxon
a)/pauston</greek>, B8.27). Again, even if in rejecting theories of
change Parmenides signifies also an 'assignment to the mind', rather
than merely a description of reality, the statement that Being 'remains
where it is firmly' (<greek>e)/mpedon au)=qi me/nei</greek>, B8.30)
evidently says something about Being. It is, in other words, an
ontological statement. Indeed, R. herself notes that, in B8.2-6,
Parmenides lists "the predicates of Being" (p.126). To make sense of
focalised monism on (2), R. thus develops what we may style a
'relativistic' picture of Parmenides. Reality as seen from one
perspective is different from, and indeed incompatible with, reality as
seen from another, while both remain ontologically equipollent. Thus,
even if the first way expresses an ontology, that ontology remains
relative to its particular perspective: "Being, on the way ho^s estin,
is without birth and death, homogeneous, immobile and without
development" (p.127). However, once we rule out the possibility that
the different ways investigate non-coextensive sets of objects of
inquiry, it becomes difficult to see how the first way can be
epistemologically superior and yet ontologically equipollent to the
wrong way(s). If the different ways simply dealt with different things,
there would be no difficulty in the view that only the first leads to
knowledge of truth concerning its particular objects of inquiry. But if
the different perspectives produce incompatible views about reality,
then their import becomes mutually exclusive, as R. herself implies
when she ascribes to the Truth "the insight according to which no
opposites are real" (p.162). If, then, the first route leads to a
correct and trustworthy understanding of reality (as R. emphasises
throughout her book), it becomes difficult to see how the stipulation
that Being is immobile 'on the way ho^s estin' delimits in any way the
validity of the ontological statement that Being is immobile.

We can maintain focalised monism only so long as we fail to distinguish
between (1) and (2). The somewhat contrary pull of (1) and (2), as well
as the textual and philosophical strain of focalised monism, are
reflected in instructive inconsistencies between some of R.'s own
statements. While adhering to focalised monism, R. elsewhere notes in
passing that the first route deals, inter alia, in metaphysics (p.178),
styles it "the right perspective" (p.169) and cites favourably Coxon's
view that, while the characteristics of the two Doxastic Forms are
'conventional in status', those of Being are 'objectively real'
(p.186f.). R. sometimes assumes that the objects of Doxastic inquiry
are also aspects of reality (concerning which we can never know the
truth): "reality, in fact, from another point of view, also shows
change" (117). Elsewhere, however, she writes that those who apply to
reality such categories as 'birth' and 'death' "must not believe that
they are real, in fact they do not describe reality as it is" (p.197).
Indeed, if, as R. argues, Parmenides rejects what-is-not for the
methodological and non-ontological reason that we can have no clear
information about it whatsoever, he should advocate complete suspension
of judgement concerning the existence or nature of such processes as
change and becoming to which what-is-not is integral, and,
consequently, concerning the truth-value of mortal opinions about such
processes. And yet, on several occasions, R. asserts confidently that,
since they involve what-is-not, the Doxai "cannot be true" (e.g. p.179,
my emphasis). Most tellingly, in the very same page R. writes both that
the Doxai are deceitful, since they employ arbitrary distinctions and
are therefore "just a way of looking at reality", and that "Parmenides'
Poem teaches the audience two perspectives: two ways of looking at
reality." (p.198). Given Parmenides' alleged non-ontological monism, it
is unclear why R. does not style the first way too as "just" a way of
looking at reality and does not pronounce it thereby equally arbitrary
and deceitful in the categories it applies to reality. Again, the
Doxai, avers R., are deceitful since they teach humans to regard as
real boundaries such as day and night which "can also be regarded as
one and the same" (p.211). The force of the relativising 'also' is
unclear: is the first route equally deceitful since it teaches mortals
to regard as real an undifferentiated unity which can 'also' be
regarded as divided according to night and day?

The paradoxes of monism are undoubtedly one of the most urgent scandals
for the student of Parmenides (to cite Simplicius: <greek>ou)k h)gno/ei
*Parmeni/dhs, o(/ti genhto\s au)to\s h)=n, w(/sper ou)de/, o(/ti du/o
po/das ei)=xen, e(\n le/gwn to\ o)/n</greek>, in Cael. 7.559.27). R.'s
radical attempt is rare and welcome if, as I think, ultimately
untenable.[[8]]

Although the book's title and its final words refer to 'becoming
Being', and although R. repeatedly indicates that the knower is to
become identical with Being, she often speaks as if the transformation
consisted in becoming like Being. For instance, in arguing that
descriptions of Being could characterise also the knowing subject, R.
typically suggests that an adjective referring to Being in one sense,
could refer to the agent in another sense (thus akine^ton in B8.26
attributes immobility to Being and mental 'steadfastness' to the mortal
agent, p.144f). The difficulty is obvious: it cannot be the mortal
agent as a whole who becomes Being, since, for instance, the mortal
agent was born and moves. Although she never elaborates on this, R.
several times restricts the transformation to the agent's mind: "Being
is what one can ... be (at least with one's mind) ... one (i.e. one's
mind) must become Being in order to understand it" (pp.208, 210).
However, a transformation whereby Being and the mortal's mind become
identical is not clearly coherent either. R. avers that birth and death
are only truly 'extinguished' (B8.21) "as the knowing subject does not
believe in them anymore, if the true pistis has convinced one to let go
of them" (p.165). Does the knower's mind become ungenerated upon
knowing and thus becoming Being? Did the mortal's mind previously have
a beginning but no more? R.'s parenthetical and unelaborated
restrictions of transformation to the agent's mind betray unease with
certain fundamental questions that arise from her basic setup but are
never addressed directly: in what precisely does the transformation
consist? What is the notion of the mortal self operative in it? From
what other aspects of the mortal are we to distinguish his 'mind' when
restricting to it the identification with Being?

A final issue which warrants brief, closer consideration is R.'s
misleadingly oversimplified treatment of Parmenides' poetic
predecessors, and her account of the relation to truth and knowledge
which the hexametric poet traditionally claims for himself. Homer,
Hesiod and Xenophanes, avers R., "all claim to know the truth" (p.43,
cf. p.48) about the subject matter of their poetry, thus recommending
themselves to their audiences as dependable, trustworthy authorities.
For her interpretation of Homeric poetics, R. relies primarily on the
invocation of the Muses in Il.2.484ff, where, so far as I can tell, the
Iliadic poet avows ignorance rather than knowledge (<greek>ou)de/ ti
i)/dmen</greek>, 486). More importantly, even if we grant the poet
himself self-assured possession or knowledge of truth, the conception
of poetic speech as alluring but potentially deceptive dominates the
Odyssey and complicates the representation of the poet as a voice of
unproblematically trustworthy truths.[[9]]

"Hesiod's Muses", writes R., "claim to tell the truth even if they can
also inspire something different" (p.44). In offering this statement as
a self-evident gloss of Theogony 27f., R. elides without argument
centuries of continuous scholarly polemic concerning what has been
described without exaggeration as "one of the most enigmatic statements
about poetry to be found in Greek literature."[[10]] All that Hesiod's
Muses claim is the knowledgeable ability to articulate both truths and
falsehoods that are similar to the genuine truths (or realities): they
offer no clear indication as to the implications of their words for
their relationship with Hesiod. The interpretation of these
implications thus becomes very much a challenge of reading the subtext.
[[11]]

With Xenophanes, the truth which the poet claims to know turns out to
be the second-order insight that no mortal can know the truth
concerning the subject-matter of his poetry (p.44f). It is doubtful
that Xenophanes would have conceptualised this second-order principle
as knowledge of a truth, important or otherwise. However Homer, Hesiod
or Xenophanes construct and promote their appeal in isolated passages,
the prospects of poetic deception, divine inscrutability and the
limitations of mortal cognition had, well before Parmenides (or
Xenophanes), complicated the portrayal of the Hexametric poet as a
figure of indisputably trustworthy authority enjoying a privileged
relationship with the divine. As early as the Odyssey, the danger of a
captivating and verisimilitudinous deception was an integral part, not
only of the fascinating allure of the poetic voice, but also of its
special affiliation with the truth, that is, its relation to a divine
inspiration that offers otherwise unavailable avenues of information,
narration and reflection.

The upshot of R.'s discussion is in itself both convincing and
stimulating. Through Parmenides' use of hexameters, she concludes,
"[t]he Greek audience are prepared for the possibility of new truths
that put old traditional truths in a different light" (p.45). But the
foregoing superficial analysis of Parmenides' predecessors embodies
also a superficial account of his reactions to them. R.'s own novel
contention that the progress of the poem's audience is what explains
and determines its structure, imagery and argumentation calls for a
more complex story about Parmenides' relation to his predecessors'
models of poetry and epistemology. If the Homeric (and especially
Odyssean) poetic figure, though in possession of truth, is sometimes
inclined also to deception, the Hesiodic poet is arguably unclear, or
perhaps even unsure, concerning the classification of his verses as
true or as verisimilitudinous falsehoods. Xenophanes, in turn,
apparently professes to enjoy the same epistemic potential as that of
his audience, and to be subject to the same limitations, except for his
revolutionary recognition of the nature of this potential and of these
limitations, a recognition which itself dispels methodological and
epistemological naivety and opens new avenues of inquiry and (perhaps)
progress (B34, B18). How do Parmenides and his goddess draw on and
supersede these different notions of the poetic voice and of the
implied reader constructed by Homer, Hesiod and Xenophanes? A more
comprehensive investigation of this question, drawing on R.'s
distinctive methodology, may produce fresh and better-rounded
explanations of the presence in Parmenides' poem of a knowledgeable
goddess, who articulates both truths and verisimilitudinous deceptions,
who identifies such deceptions with traditional teaching and who
enables the mortal, poetic voice, and so his mortal audience, to
acquire the knowledge they need in order to distinguish these two
different kinds of divinely disclosed speech.

Although R.'s exposition is generally very lucid and accessible, it is
also excessively repetitious: theses general and specific are
throughout announced, stated and restated with sometimes burdening
frequency. The English is severely under-edited, with numerous typos
and ungrammatical sentences. The bibliography is sometimes inaccurate
and does not refer the reader to all the scholarship referred to in the
text. (A reference on page 71 to 'Dickey 1996, 9 is to E. Dickey, Greek
forms of address (Oxford, 1996); a reference on page 115, n.317 to
'Curd Kenig' 1991, 253' is to P.K. Curd, 'Parmenidean Monism',
Phronesis 36 (1991), pp.241-264.) But for all its minor flaws and
despite -- and occasionally thanks to -- its more substantial
difficulties, this provocative, daring and imaginative monograph will
no doubt make a stimulating contribution to Parmenidean scholarship.

------------------
Notes:


1.   A.A. Long, Phronesis Vol.53, no.3 (2008), p.296f.

2.   A.A. Long, "Parmenides on Thinking Being", BACAP 12 (1996),
pp.125-151.

3.   P.58 contains some interesting philological insights about B3.

4.   P.99f. contain an excellent, remarkably lucid and wisely
inconclusive discussion of the two ways / three ways question,
assessing the merits and demerits of the various views.

5.   See pp.169-171 for a masterly discussion of B8.35f.

6.   Cf. Long's praises, see n.1.

7.   E.g. (1) "certain aspects of reality that the audience should not
focus on if they are looking for understanding" (p.119); the first
route focuses on "what is and does not change", the other(s) on "what
changes and is different" (p.86); while the first route focuses on
Being, the Doxai's project "involves focusing on something else"
(p.198, R.'s emphases); (2) "one can learn to see everything as a
unity, if one looks from a certain perspective" (p.129, my emphasis).

8.   For the most plausible model to date see the recent A.P.D.
Mourelatos, The Route of Parmenides: Revised and Expanded Edition (Las
Vegas, 2008), pp.xlii-xlviii.

9.   Odysseus is systematically portrayed as a poet-like figure (see
e.g. C. Moulton, Similes in the Homeric Poems (Goettingen, 1977),
p.153) and it is specifically in reference to one of his Cretan Lies
that Eumaeus compares Odysseus' 'enchanting' speech to that of a poet
(Od.17.514-521).

10.   P. Pucci, Hesiod and the Language of Poetry (London, 1977), p.8.

11.   Although R. throws her lot in with the majority, and although
there is certainly much to be said for this traditional view, numerous
scholars have argued powerfully that Hesiod's Muses either implicate
the poet in both kinds of poetic speech, or leave the issue unclear.
See e.g. G.M. Ledbetter, Poetics Before Plato: Interpretation and
Authority in Early Greek Theories of Poetry (Princeton, 2003),
pp.40-61.