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Philosophy born of Poetry; the essential, the surprising Parmenides
Poetry at the beginning of Western philosophy and culture stirring for utterance of what is, honoring what is song in defiance of silence, spiting oblivion glorying in awareness, giving notice until out of the same epic pursuit, heroic purpose - Inquiry! thought arises
In Parmenides (fl. late 6th century/early 5th century BCE), the earliest known instance of deductive reasoning emerges from a poem. Titled “On Nature,” the work engages ancient Greek epic tradition with its heroic hexameters and grand scheme: a goddess teaches the youthful narrator the Way of Truth. Poetry (in)forms thinking.
…to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…
Ancient Greek poetry, epic or lyric, sings its dedication to Aletheia rightly defined1; Aletheia as and for truth, as the overriding pursuit and purpose of poetry. The poets gloried in special access and faculty for this awareness of truth not only as opposed to falsehood, but as opposed to forgetting (the word’s root, lēthē, indicates "forgetfulness, oblivion,” with the prefix a-, “not, without”). Silence, as beautiful and golden as it is, is oblivion. Poetic Aletheia makes things shine forth in the song of the poet, for fame and memory. The truth needs this shining forth in words, otherwise it is lost. What is and what has happened, told with accuracy and justice (Dike, justice, what is due, goes hand in hand with Aletheia); it is an injustice not to perserve the truth from oblivion. Up until Parmenides, the poets undertook their responsibility for truth-telling on the wings of inspiration, thanks to the Muses, or a tutelary deity; and ultimately, their exceptional poetic claim to awareness depended upon the authority of the divine. Parmenides, too, relied on divine credit - the goddess of his poem. What’s astounding in Parmenides is that his gift from the goddess, her revelation regarding the routes of Inquiry2 to a youth venturing “far from the beaten track” is itself a piece of extended argument and logic, asserting and exemplifying at the same time the path to Aletheia. This is revolutionary! Beyond inspiration and revelation, with nothing exceptional except the practice and diligent application of means indicated and argued for, the truth can be humanly thought-through. Prized Aletheia of poetry becomes philosophy.
The means to Aletheia, like metrical poetry, provides freedom through constraint; just as, within bounds and rules, the trueing of a poetic line sets its music, the route to truth and its telling against ignorance and forgetting models its own proof. Balance and paralellism uphold, as if presented on a platter, the choice between being and non-being demanded by the goddess (“is” and “is not”); mutually exclusive, you can’t have both if you are speaking and thinking on the route of truth. One is and is true, and the other is not and is nothing; to say or to think otherwise is confusion. For Aletheia, sever - critically, decisively - each and every incompatibility. From this critical severance at the level of the balanced, single line, Parmenides’ hexameters involve themselves in the poem’s lengthier reasoning, their syllabic and syntactical patterns - their periodicity - creating expectation and anticipatory fulfillment, a melodic sense of convincing fittingness: rhythms of inference. Thinking falls into place. It must follow, it necessarily follows… a telling logic, the music of thought.
Nature, physics. Beyond mind, beyond brains and thinking - music of the spheres? Cosmic background radiation? Vacuum or Plenum? To dare awareness, seeing through. Or better, or as well, hearing through. From noticing what is apparent to penetration into the depths, seeing through; with endurance, seeing through our work and task, and, indeed, our thinking, seeing the thinking through; seeing through to the essence of things. In attending to the fitness, to the rightness of a falling into place of thought, hearing through; with attunement, hearing the false note, the false quantity; distinguishing, hearing through the noise; hearing through to the striking of a resonant chord. Cauldron gong rumbles long after it’s touched.
the essential, the surprising
Truth needs telling. As someone who has always trusted foremost in self-evidence, the clear present radiance of what exists, I think it took my working on this entry of Poetry, Thought, Word Magick to have me fully realize that even if truth abides, it won’t surely out. Beyond the fight against lies, disinformation, and propaganda, inclusive of that battle for attention and dominance of the newscycle - also concomitant with any willingness to engage the clash of contemporary and historical narratives - the truth needs support against oblivion itself. Silence is an enemy of truth, despite reality’s implicit shimmer. Epic poets of ancient Greece understood, nobly, the need to sing the great deeds, the great crises. There are times to give up clinging to the solace of intrinsicality. One needs to sing - and think through - and defend - the real. The truth needs you.
Going further back than Greece to Egypt, the hieroglyph for glory is a scroll next to a sacred ibis: written (or recorded) splendor.
The following is an entry from the month I started this Substack at the end of 2021. I keep thinking the same things over and over again, though differently - surprise!, the arising re-arises, and then, every now and again, newness.
The poetic suggests bracing for the real. After all, I mention Logos in the mightiness of Heraclitus’ usage, whereby his oracular fragments ring with Truth in the eternal fire splendor of their pure poetry. On the other hand - and I think fate is implicit in all this - it was in Parmenides’ poem that the first (or proto-)syllogisms arrived and it is the rhythm and balance of inference which makes it unsettling to evade such consistency of if this then that, its equilibrium “therefore” placing a lock on non-contradiction - from the measures (meter) of Logos, an arguable order of logic. Thus, thought gets locked in by its necessity, and linked and locked by what is fitting and due, “poetic justice,” in accordance with an inkling for what closes in on what’s already close to us, what’s dear in the lyric, that poetic link to a deepest need for something real, something justifying and true, and therefore, indeed - a calling.
As I evolve the professionalization of this Substack, your support and participation hold me steady to the grind. This is much appreciated. Dr. Johnson famously said, “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” and although I’m that blockhead as much as he in fact was, I’m aging out of any last juvenile tendencies to ignore the costs of gratuitous expenditures of my time and energy. That said, love labors on nevertheless - thank you above all for your time and attention.
Every creative person should take to heart this passage from Gershom Scholem’s Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship - whatever your claims may be. When Benjamin and his future wife, Dora Sophie Kellner, heard a young Scholem read aloud an essay he had written for Martin Buber’s journal, Der Jude, they let him know they liked the work, but then proceeded to chew him out for, as they discovered, his “childishly” having asked too modest an honorarium.3 Benjamin told him, “To be in possession of truth is sufficient justification for one’s claim to a living.”
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Rose Cherubin, “Aletheia from Poetry into Philosophy: Homer to Parmenides” in Logos and Muthos: Philosophical Essays in Greek Literature edited by William Wians, SUNY Press, 2009
Ever a fan of Heraclitus, I took a later turn to Parmenides thanks to the expertise of Rose Cherubin, associate professor of philosophy at George Mason University; I look back with wonder and gratitude for our years of conversation on the Presocratics - and have never stopped mulling her always exacting insights on Parmenides’ poem. In the paper cited, Cherubin explores Aletheia beyond both “truth” and Heidegger’s “unconcealedness,” broadening understanding of the scope of the word’s usage based on instances in Homer, Pindar, and Bacchylides: from her, I mention the contrasting relation of Aletheia not only to falsehood, but to forgetting; as well, she distinguishes “noticing,” awareness, on top of or in addition to Aletheia’s unconcealing, uncovering, discovery, disclosure - “it is quite possible to fail to notice something that is not concealed.” Cherubin goes into great depth on the characteristics of Aletheia and notes, with many further details and qualifications, their kinship with the phrasing of the legal truth oath from English common law.
The routes of Inquiry are two: the Way of Truth, that path characterized by Aletheia; and the Way of Seeming, the mistaken path of mortal opinion - “in which there is no true trust.” (David Gallop translation)
p.36-37, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, New York Review Books Classics, 2003, translated from the German by Harry Zohn.