Eleatics
.
The Eleatics, named after the south-western Italian coastal town of Elea, are among the Pre-Socratics and formed the oldest philosophical school of Greek antiquity. Their main representative was Parmenides, who saw the world as based on an eternally unchanging being, to which the world of the senses was merely a transient phenomenon. Other important representatives of the School of Elea were Zeno of Elea and Melissos of Samos. Xenophanes, who was originally considered the founder of the school and the teacher of Parmenides, is no longer counted among the Eleatics according to current knowledge.
„The thinkers mentioned are followed for the historical account by: Xenophanes of Colophon (born in the 6th century BC); related to him in spirit, though younger: Parmenides (born around 540 BC; living as a teacher in Athens); Zeno of Elea (whose heyday is around 500 BC); Melissos of Samos (who lived around 450 BC).
In these thinkers the thought element already lives to such a degree that they demand a worldview and ascribe truth to such a worldview alone, in which the thought life is fully satisfied. What must be the nature of the original cause of the world in order that it may be fully assimilated within thought? - they ask. - Xenophanes finds that the popular gods cannot exist before thought; therefore he rejects them. His God must be able to be thought. What the senses perceive is changeable, is afflicted with qualities that do not correspond to thought, which must seek the permanent. Therefore, God is the unchanging, eternal unity of all things that can be grasped in thought. - Parmenides sees in external nature, which the senses contemplate, the untrue, the deceptive; in the unity, the imperishable, which thought grasps, only the true. Zeno seeks to deal with the thought-experience in such a way that he points out the contradictions that arise in a view of the world that sees a truth in the change of things, in the becoming, in the many things that the outer world shows. Of the contradictions to which he refers, let us mention only one. He thinks that the fastest runner (Achilles) cannot reach the tortoise, for however slowly it crawls, when Achilles reaches the place it has just occupied, it is already a little further on. By such contradictions Zeno indicates how an imagination that holds to the external world cannot come to terms with itself; he points to the difficulty that thought encounters when it attempts to find the truth. The significance of this worldview, which is called the Eleatic (Parmenides and Zeno are from Elea), will be recognised if one directs one's gaze to the fact that its bearers have progressed so far with the formation of thought-experience that they have shaped this experience into a special art, the so-called dialectic. In this "art of thought" the soul learns to feel itself in its independence and inner unity. Thus the reality of the soul is felt as what it is through its own being, and as what it feels itself to be through the fact that it no longer, as in the past, lives along with the general world-experience, but unfolds in itself a life - the thought-experience - which is rooted in it, and through which it can feel itself implanted in a purely spiritual world-ground. At first this feeling does not yet find expression in a clearly expressed thought; but one can feel it alive as a feeling in this age by the esteem in which it is held. According to one of Plato's "Conversations", Parmenides told the young Socrates that he should learn the art of thought from Zeno, otherwise truth would remain distant from him. This "art of thought" was felt to be a necessity for the human soul that wants to approach the spiritual roots of existence.
Whoever does not see in the progress of human development to the stage of thought-experiences, how with the beginning of this life real experiences - the image-experiences - ceased to exist, which were present before, will see the special character of the thinking personalities of the sixth and the following pre-Christian centuries in Greece in a different light than in that in which they must be presented in these explanations. Thought drew something like a wall around the human soul. Formerly it was, according to its feeling, within the phenomena of nature; and what it experienced together with these phenomena of nature, as it experienced the activity of its own body, presented itself before it in pictorial appearances, which were there in their vitality; now the whole picture-painting was obliterated by the power of thought. Where before the pictures full of content spread out, now the thought stretched through the outer world. And the soul could only feel itself in that which spreads outside in space and time by uniting itself with thought.“ (Lit.:GA 18, p. 57ff)
Literature
- Rudolf Steiner: Die Rätsel der Philosophie in ihrer Geschichte als Umriß dargestellt, GA 18 (1985), ISBN 3-7274-0180-X English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
 |
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com. Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English. Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA) Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF. |
