From the Beginning to Plato

124 PYTHAGOREANS AND ELEATICS
‘enquiry’, as something actually on foot, unless there was an argument to show
that enquiry is always successful. It will now be suggested that in fact the
remaining pieces of text, dealing with the rejection of ‘it is not’, give the
supporting argument for (3).
(B) For the same thing is for thinking and for being.
(DK 28 B 3)
It must be that what is for saying and for thinking, is; for it is for being, but
what is not is not [for being]…
(DK 28 B 6.1–2)
These passages are part of the conclusion of the rejection of ‘it is not’. But they
should be treated, at least initially, as (part of) a separate argument from the one
reconstructed above. Once again, Homeric usage is an important guide. ‘It is for
being/thinking/saying’ represents an idiom familiar in Homer: ‘A is for x-ing’
means either ‘there is A available to do some x-ing’ or ‘there is A available to be
x-ed’.
Much depends here on what sort of thing might be said to be ‘available for saying
and thinking’. In Homeric usage, the object of the verbs ‘say’ and ‘think’ is
usually expressed by a ‘that’-clause. What the clause describes is the state of
affairs, in virtue of which the saying or thinking is true or not.
An interpretation is possible within these linguistic constraints. Parmenides is
arguing for the thesis that what can be said and thought, must actually be the
case; i.e. that one can say and think only ‘things that are’, these being thought of
not as true statements but as actual states of affairs.
The argument has a very close affinity with one which troubled Plato in
various places, notably in the Sophist (but he did not accept it as correct, in the
Sophist or elsewhere). 12 The ‘Platonic problem’ (as it may be called for
convenience) starts from the premiss (4), that saying and thinking must have, as
objects, a state of affairs, actual or not; i.e. a genuine case of saying or thinking
must be a case of saying or thinking that such and such is the case. But then, (5)
if saying or thinking actually and not merely apparently occurs, its object must
exist. Now, (6) for a state of affairs, to exist is just to be actual. Hence (7) only
actual states of affairs are thought and said, i.e. all thinking and saying is true.
In what is left of Parmenides’ text there appears, not quite this argument, but a
far-reaching modal variation of it. What can be thought and said, must by (4) be
at least a possible state of affairs (‘it is for being’). But (8) there can be no
unrealized, ‘bare‘ possibilities. The argument to this effect is brought out
effectively by the idiomatic ‘is for being’. What ‘is for thinking’, also ‘is for
being’, and therefore necessarily is. There can be nothing more to ‘being for
being’, than just being. Anything that is not, cannot be in any sense, and so
cannot even ‘be for being’. Hence every possible state of affairs is actual, and so
it must be that (7) what can be thought and said is true.