From the Beginning to Plato

FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO 133
So when the goddess distinguishes ‘the unmoving heart’, and the ‘middle’, of
reality, implying that there is also a peripheral part, she must be understood as
speaking, in a conventional way, about a situation which could be described
more correctly. What she means by it, has now to be considered.
The Errors of ‘Mortals’ and the Place of Ordinary Experience
It remains to ask how this reality is supposed to be related to the world of
ordinary experience.
In Parmenides’ rejection of the ‘way of mortals’, it was seen that senseexperience
in itself did not seem to be blamed for their mistakes. It was mortals’
habitual misinterpretation of sense experience which caused them to fall into
self-contradiction.
After the exploration of the nature of reality, it is possible to specify the
fundamental mistake of ‘mortals’ more clearly, and Parmenides does so:
The same thing is for thinking and [is] the thought that it is; for you will not
find thinking apart from what is, in which it is made explicit. For nothing
other is or will be outside what is, since that has been bound by fate to be
whole and unchanging. Hence it will all be [just] name, all the things that
mortals have laid down, trusting them to be real, as coming-into-being and
perishing, being and not being, changing place and altering bright colour.
(DK 28 B 8.34–41)
‘Mortals’, here too, includes all who accept a world of real plurality and real
change. Such people are committed to the reality of what are in fact conventional
fictions or ‘names’, taken as putative objects of thinking and saying. The passage
starts with a reaffirmation of the principle derived from the ‘Platonic problem’
(see above): ‘what can be thought is just the thought that it is’, since this is (with
its various consequences) the only true thought. Because there is no saying and
thinking something false, apparent false thought must be ‘mere names’. So too at
the beginning of the cosmology (see next section), where we shall see that even
‘mere names’ (like other conventions, so long as intelligently made and properly
observed) can have their uses.
It is the subjects of ordinary discourse, the things that we normally identify as
the plural changing contents of the world, that are here denounced as just
‘name’, conventional noises and nothing more. Since statements about them
cannot be true, they are not capable of being genuinely spoken and thought
about.
The self-contradictory ‘way of mortals’ is now explained. ‘Mortals’ recognize
the existence of an objective reality, and therefore say ‘it is’. But they also have
to say ‘it is not’, because they take reality to be something truly plural and
changing. 19