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From Myth to Mind
November 16, 1998
Being and Becoming: Heraclitus & Parmenides
I. Discussion of Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
A. Heraclitus [pp. 50 - 69]
50: "Becoming" -- "everlasting wavebeat and rhythm of things"
51: "Lawful order, unfailing certainties, ever -like orbits of lawfulness, Erinnyes sitting in Judgment on all transgressions against lawful order"
52: "You use names for things as though they rigidly persistently endured; yet even the stream into which you step a secon time is not the one you stepped into before."
54: "Ordinary people....light and dark..." [compare with Parmenides, KR, pp. 255-256, FRAG.#302]
55: Strife in Justice --the strife of the opposites--grown out of the Greek Agon.
66-67: Remarks on Pythagoras & Empedocles
B. Parmenides [pp. 69 - 90]
69: "purest absolutely bloodless abstraction" -- "UnGreek"
"At the same time however, this moment divides Pre-Socratic thinking into two halves" --(1) The Anaximander period (2)The Parmenidean period
70: {P} "A nature wholly petrified by logical rigidity and almost transformed into a thinking machine."
70 - 72: Parmenides vs. Heraclitus--contraries vs. contradicitions (pos. & neg.)
72 - 73: "What is coming-to-be--- "suffice it to say that we shall enter the fog .. the realm of mythology"
76: "Can something which is not be a quality"
79: "Thus he accomplished the immensely significant first critique of man's apparatus of knowledge."
81: Parmenides compared with Pythagoras or Empedocles
81 - 82: "Experience nowhere offered him being as he imagined it, but he concluded its existence from the fact that he was able to think about it. This is a conclusion which rests on the assumption that we have an organ of knowledge which reaches into the essence of things and is independent of experience."
83: On the word "being" --designates only the most general relationship which connects all things
84: "Thinking and that bulbous spherical being..."
88: Critique of Parmenides: The motion and sequence of thinking. What then are the senses if they are deceivers. "But if the senses are semblance, to whom do they dissemble? How, being unreal, can they deceive?"
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