From the Beginning to Plato

120 PYTHAGOREANS AND ELEATICS
The Promise of the Goddess
Central to the understanding of Parmenides is the promise made by the goddess:
It is necessary that you find out everything: both the unmoving heart of
well-rounded reality [alētheiē], and the opinions of mortals, in which there
is no real guarantee of truth—but still, these things too you shall learn, how
[or: since] it had to be that opinions should reputably be, all of them going
through everything.
(DK 28 B 1.28–32)
The division of the objects of discovery into two determines the structure of the
rest of the poem. It rests on the distinction (explicit since Xenophanes at least)
between what can and what cannot be certainly known. The first pan, concerned
with alētheiē, will contain only certainties. The second part, of which the truth
cannot be guaranteed, will contain ‘opinions of mortals’. As with Xenophanes,
there are better and worse opinions: those to be revealed are not any old opinions,
but ones which enjoy the status of being ‘reputable’, and which form a complete
system. 6
If we leave on one side, for the moment, the ‘opinions’ and what is here said
about them, 7 the next fundamental question is the meaning of the word alētheiē.
In English, it is usually translated by ‘truth’, to which it seems to correspond in
the spread of its early usage. The adjective alēthēs, from which it is formed, has
much the same spread as ‘true’ (covering the areas indicated by the words
‘truthful’, ‘accurate’, ‘real’, and ‘genuine’; though not that of ‘faithful’). But in
Parmenides the translation ‘reality’ for Parmenides’ alētheiē must be insisted on,
in order to bring out the essential point: what is referred to here is not anything
(words, speech, thoughts) that is or makes a true statement; it is what the true
statement is about, and is guaranteed by: the underlying actual state of things, the
reality. So, later on, the goddess marks the end of the first part by saying, ‘At this
point I end for you my trusty tale and thought concerning alētheiē.’ 8
While ‘reality’ may be taken as the closest word to the intended primary
meaning here, it is also true that alētheiē, as in Homer, carries implications about
the certainty of what is said, and of the correctness and accuracy of the method
by which it is found. Parmenides wants to insist on these points too; which he
does, here and elsewhere, primarily by words indicating trustworthiness and its
guarantees (pistos, pistis, peitbō). The goddess promises not only insight into
some reality, but a guarantee of the truth of the insight.
This reality is ‘well-rounded’, presumably because it forms a satisfactorily
coherent and closed system; and it has an ‘unmoving heart’, presumably because
at least in essentials it is not subject to change. Both of these thoughts reappear
significantly later.