The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s8: H.—Pythagoras and Parmenides
The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s8
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H.—Pythagoras and Parmenides
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U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff³ holds that in the doctrine of Philolaos the five bodies in the sphaira are the four elements, which compose it, with as fifth ὁ τᾶς σφαίρας ὁλκός in the sense of that which gives the sphaira its form, the nature of that something being only vaguely felt; in the *Timaios* Plato makes the world-soul perform an analogous function. He insists⁴ that it is to Aristotle we must look for the conception of the ether as a fifth element, for he evidently deliberately claims this as his own invention. The assertion of Xenokrates⁵ which ascribes the doctrine to Plato he explains either as referring to a casual adoption of the idea by Plato, which he did not carry farther, or to his accepting an innovation of Aristotle’s. Doubtless ascription to Plato or Aristotle of the precise form of the doctrine is legitimate, but there is force in the view of Rostagni⁶ that already in the early Pythagorean view, if we accept the traditional accounts, the basis of the doctrine existed. The fifth element is the περιέχον which is described also as the other as well as the ἄπειρον πνεῦμα, while on the immaterial side we have the world spirit as the power which binds together the mass. In any event there is no close similarity between the Greek and the Indian conception of ether, whether as regards the final doctrine as seen in Aristotle or the material whence it was developed.
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³ *Platon*², ii. 91 f.
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⁴ *Ibid.* i. 718. For Plato’s claim, see Frank, *Plato und die sogenannten Pythagoreer* (1923), pp. 233, 319 f.
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⁵ Simplikios, *Phys.* 1165; Eva Sachs, *Die fünf platonischen Körper*, pp. 9 ff., 41 ff.
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⁶ *Il Verbo di Pitagora* (1924), pp. 56 ff.
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Frank,¹ as against Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, insists that in the fragment of Philolaos there is a reference to the twofold doctrine of the five regular bodies and their correspondence with the five elements, but he holds that this is merely one of many proofs that the ascription of the fragment to Philolaos is a mere error. He points out ² that the natural deduction to be made from Plato’s writings is that both the doctrine of the irrational and the discovery of the five figures were invented shortly before the time when he accepted them, apparently by Theaitetos. He denies to the real Pythagoras the mathematical achievements claimed for him, but ignored by Xenophanes, Herakleitos, Empedokles, and Herodotos,³ placing them in the Platonic age, while he traces the mathematical philosophy of the Pythagoreans to an effort to reconcile the doctrines of Anaxagoras and Demokritos, pointing out that their views are inconceivable before Anaxagoras (*c.* 460–430 B. C.) had clearly distinguished the ideas of quality and quantity, and first Protagoras and then Demokritos (*c.* 430 B. C.) had established the doctrine of the subjectivity of sense qualities. The Pythagorean view was thus one of points as monads, related to the dynamic conception of matter in Anaxagoras and the materialistic atomism of Demokritos as was the Monadologia physica of Kant’s youth to the dynamic conception of matter in Leibnitz and the atomism of Huyghens and Newton. Without necessarily accepting the whole of Frank’s contentions, and in particular the view that Speusippos is the real author of the Philolaos fragments, it is clear that we cannot safely accord to Pythagoras himself credit for his mathematical discoveries, and thus one important ground for the alleged derivation of his views from India disappears.
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¹ *Op. cit.*, pp. 318 ff.
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² *Ibid.*, pp. 227 ff. Cf. Vogt, *Bibl. Math.* x. 97 ff.; Heath, *Greek Math.* i. 157.
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³ *Ibid.*, pp. 219–22.
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Frank, who candidly recognizes ⁴ the influence of Egypt on the beginnings of Greek mathematics and derives ⁵ thence the Greek knowledge of the planets—which, of course, were certainly not borrowed from India—insists ⁶ that the essential turning point in Greek thought came with the Persian war, after which Greece broke free from connexion with the general oriental tendency of thought, and Anaxagoras formulated the fundamental principle of the distinction between our subjective world and reality, as it appears to an ideal spectator, in his doctrine of optics. In the Chāndogya Upaniṣad ⁷ we find the assertion that all things can be resolved into one or other of three elements, but no proof is attempted, and the difference is indicative of the distance which separates Greek and Indian trends of thought. Others again tend to argue that Iranian ideas, partly themselves of Babylonian origin, were influential ⁸ on early Greek thought as well as later,⁹ but, whatever the value of these views, they do not support any direct, nor probably any indirect, influence of India on Greece.
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⁴ *Ibid.*, p. 79; Heath, i. 121.
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⁵ *Ibid.*, pp. 197, 201 f. Cf. K. Kerényi, *Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft*, xxii. 245–56.
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⁶ *Ibid.*, pp. 143 ff.
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⁷ vi. 2 ff.
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⁸ Thus Eudoxos is credited with being the intermediary for the introduction of oriental ideas by Norden, *Geburt des Kindes* (1924), pp. 29 ff. Cf. Kerényi, *Archiv*, xxii. 256; Jäger, *Aristoteles*, p. 133.
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⁹ The effort to find the influence of the Brāhmaṇa conception of Prajāpati as the year on the Aion doctrine made by Reitzenstein, *Das iranische Erlösungsmysterium* (cf. L. Troje, *Archiv*, xxii. 87 ff.) and others is not at all convincing.
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The probability of parallelism as regards the development of the doctrine of transmigration is shown by the fact that Plato in the *Laws* ¹ treats the idea as pre-Pythagorean and illustrates one motive creating it in the view that the murderer of a father or mother must be reborn to endure in his own person the punishment of a similar fate. It is no more surprising that such an idea should be found independently in two countries than that the Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa ² should record as a symptom of divinely induced madness the action of a priest in cutting off the heads of his father’s cattle, even as Aias shows his dementia by his onslaught on his kine. The tale of Aias was known to the *Little Iliad*,³ and was probably current by 700 B. C., far too early to permit of borrowing. For Greece Wilamowitz-Moellendorff ⁴ finds the cause of the doctrine in the succession of generations, the grandson bearing the grandfather’s name and reproducing him, while Rostagni ⁵ insists on the fact that the early mind, when it reflects, is unable to conceive of anything utterly perishing or coming into being from nothing, and thus is induced to accept transmigration. It is surprising that Gomperz,⁶ who recognizes this fact, should insist on deriving the Greek view from India. His view is evidently based in part on inaccurate information, as in the case of his contention that ‘the formulae which summarize the whole of the “circle and wheel” of birth are likewise the same in both’ Pythagorean and Indian belief. Similarly he finds ⁷ a curious parallel between the appearance of the doctrine of transmigration shortly before the belief of Parmenides in the one reality, as compared with the first records of transmigration in India as occurring not long before the doctrine of the eternal one; this suggestion of Oldenberg ⁸ is not supported by the facts, which suggest that the order in time of the doctrines was rather the reverse. Gomperz admits, however, the radical difference between the Greek outlook as scientific as well as religious, and the Indian as mainly religious. A most striking illustration of the divergence is furnished by the doctrine of the Pythagoreans recorded by Aristotle ⁹ explaining how souls were always available to enter new bodies when these came into being. They found the explanation in the existence of particles of dust in the sunlight, which they conceived to be living souls, not immaterial but formed of fine matter, a conception which maintained itself as late as the Neo-Platonists ¹⁰ in one aspect of the doctrine of πνεῦμα.
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¹ 870 ff.
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² ii. 269–72 (Yavakrī’s story).
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³ Jebb, *Ajax*, pp. xvi f.
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⁴ *Platon*,² i. 251. Cf. Tylor, *Primitive Culture*, ii. 14. For the Orphic belief, see Rohde, *Psyche*, ii⁴. 109, 121, and for the close relations of Pythagorean and Orphic views, Frank, *op. cit.*, pp. 356 f.
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⁵ *Op. cit.*, p. 150.
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⁶ *Greek Thinkers*, i. 124.
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⁷ *Op. cit.* i. 552.
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⁸ *Buddha*², p. 45.
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⁹ *de An.* i. 2. The doctrine may be from Demokritos (cf. Frank, pp. 101 ff.).
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¹⁰ Inge, *Plotinus*, i. 219 f.
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The parallel drawn by Garbe between the doctrine of the Upaniṣads and that of Parmenides is, of course, largely discounted, if we accept the view that Parmenides was essentially not the father of idealism but of materialism, as claimed by Burnet,¹¹ who with Zeller ¹² denies to Parmenides the assertion of the identity of thought and being which is attributed to him by Garbe. Burnet ¹³ also further differentiates Parmenides from the doctrine of the Upaniṣads by denying that the second part of his poem is intended as an exposition of appearances as opposed to reality in the sense that Parmenides admitted in some degree that appearances existed. On his view, as on that of Diels, this part of the poem merely deals with opinions of others, which are necessarily false, those others being, as he thinks, Pythagoreans, not, as in Diels’s view, followers of Herakleitos. But this latter view is opposed both by Gomperz¹ and Wilamowitz,² and it must be regarded as far from satisfactorily made out,³ while the treatment by Plato of Parmenides is inconsistent with the view that he was really a mere materialist. The analogy of Spinoza cited by Gomperz is perhaps the most enlightening; the one is material but also it is spiritual; ‘It is universal matter and universal spirit at once, but the matter is sterile because capable of no expansion and the spirit powerless because capable of no action.’ Gomperz, however, is clearly erroneous in comparing the Vedānta philosophy, which in no form develops this precise doctrine.
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¹¹ *Early Greek Philosophy*², pp. 198, n. 1, 208.
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¹² *Pre-Socratic Phil.* i. 584, n. 1 (*Phil. d. Griech.* i⁵. 588, n. 1).
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¹³ *Op. cit.*, pp. 210 ff.
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¹ *Op. cit.* i. 179. Cf. Diels, *Parmenides*, pp. 63, 100.
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² *Platon*², i. 75 f., 562 f.; *Hermes*, xxxiv. 203 ff. Cf. Reinhardt, *Parmenides* (1916), pp. 5 ff.; Arnim, *Kultur der Gegenwart*, I. v. 106.
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³ Despite Rostagni, *op. cit.*, pp. 22 ff.; A. Covetti, *Ann. delle Univ. Toscane*, xxiii. 40 ff.
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K. Reinhardt,⁴ again, insists that Parmenides admits no distinction between thinking and being,⁵ but in his doctrine of opinion he aims, not at describing any merely apparent reality, but at the world as it necessarily presents itself to man, a world in which being and not-being stand side by side commingled, although he has no means of explaining their union, whence arises this empirical universe, save by hinting (μορφὰς γὰρ κατέθεντο δύο γνώμας ὀνομάζειν) that it is conventional as opposed to the one reality. Parmenides, on this view, in lieu of being essentially a materialist, was rather a logician, who, however, had not reached the stage when thought could be held to be other than reality. Like Frank, Reinhardt⁶ rejects the idea of any connexion between Parmenides and the Pythagoreans; nor indeed is there any real ground for this suggestion, least of all for the conception of Burnet that Parmenides was a Pythagorean who was renouncing the false doctrines of his youth.
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⁴ *Parmenides*, pp. 30 ff., 69 ff. His view that Herakleitos is later than Parmenides (pp. 64, 155 ff.) is plausible, but not certain; cf. Rostagni, *Il Verbo di Pitagora*, pp. 12 ff. That frag. 6 and 8 of Parmenides refer to Herakleitos is equally dubious.
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⁵ In the famous passage τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἔστιν τε καὶ εἶναι Burnet insists (*Greek Philosophy*, i. 67, n. 1) that the infinitives cannot be regarded as subjects, and that the meaning must be that it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be. He leaves unexplained what Parmenides conceived to be the relation between being and thought, and his dictum is not valid. That the infinitive was not originally a subject is no proof that it could not become one, i. e. be felt as one. Cf. Gildersleeve, *Syntax of Classical Greek*, i. 132; Goodwin, *Greek Moods and Tenses*, p. 300; Herakleitos, frag. 112 τὸ φρονεῖν ἀρετὴ μεγίστη, καὶ σοφία ἀληθέα λέγειν; *Iliad*, i. 274; x. 174; Stahl, *Syntax d. griech. Verbums*, pp. 601 ff.
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⁶ *Op. cit.*, pp. 231 ff.
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The views of Parmenides, therefore, must be deemed a parallel of interest to Indian thought, but not derived from India. In this regard interest also attaches to his treatment of the ideas of being, not-being, and being and not-being, which is reiterated in Gorgias,⁷ and presents a certain similarity, but also in its dialectic an instructive contrast, to the treatment of the issue in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad.⁸
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⁷ Reinhardt, pp. 36 f.; Gorgias, frag. 3. If Reinhardt is right in the effort (pp. 89 ff.) to place Xenophanes’s theistic interpretation of the unity of the universe after Parmenides’s philosophical discoveries, the parallel (p. 153, n. 1) with the development in India to the Çvetāçvatara Upaniṣad’s theism is noteworthy. But the view is uncertain.
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⁸ vi. 2. 1, 2; *contra*, v. 19. 1; TU. ii. 7; the absolute includes both being and not-being in the Muṇḍaka (ii. 2. 1) and Praçna (ii. 5). The fourfold treatment of being, not-being, being and not-being, neither being nor not-being is first developed in Buddhist texts. For dialectic comparable in quality with that of Gorgias we must wait until such texts as the Māṇḍūkya Kārikā (e. g. iv. 3 f., 83) or Nāgārjuna (Keith, *Buddhist Philosophy*, pp. 237 ff.). Cf. for Gorgias, Reinhardt, pp. 37 ff.; Gomperz, *Greek Thinkers*, i. 482 ff.; Plato’s *Sophist*.
Linked texts (6)
- Chāndogyopaniṣad — Sanskrit
- Āgamaśāstra — Gauḍapāda, Sanskrit
- Praśnopaniṣad — Pippalāda, Sanskrit
- Muṇḍakopaniṣad — Sanskrit
- Taittirīyopaniṣad — Sanskrit
- Jaiminīyabrāhmaṇa — Sanskrit