Mythe et philosophie chez Parménide. En Appendice Traduction du Poème (review)

Book Reviews Lambros Couloubaritsis. Mythe et philosophiechezParm~nide.En Appendice Traduction du Po~me. Brussels: Editions Ousia, 1986. Pp. 379. Paper, NP. R. M. Hare, in his masterful little study of Plato in the Past Masters series (Oxford, 1982), propounds the pleasant conceit, arising from the startling differences in modes of interpreting the great man, that one might imagine that one was dealing with two quite different thinkers, Pato and Lato. One might say the same about Parmenides, except that his name does not divide itself up quite so neatly. In Parmenides' case, one has the Continental school of interpreters, whether influenced by Heidegger or the French structuralists or both, presenting him as a hierophant of Being, and one has the Anglo-American school, anxious to enroll him as an honorary linguistic analyst. C., though himself Greek, is of the Franco-German tradition (though well-read in both traditions), and is distinctly out of sympathy with the Anglo-Americans (among whom, ironically--though with justice--he would rank his fellow Hellene Alexander Mourelatos). His work, indeed, may profitably be viewed in conjunction with the recently published (1987) Etudes sur ParmCnide, in two volumes, put out by a C.N.R.S. team in Paris under the direction of Pierre Aubenque (to which C. himself contributed), which is a good conspectus of current thinking in the French school. The value of C.'s book---and it is not negligible--lies in the emphasis he places on the mythic aspect of the poem, and the detailed investigation of the whole text which he embarks on from this perspective. The book comprises an Introduction and three large chapters (suitably subdivided), each dealing with a section of the poem: Proem, Way of Truth, and Way of Seeming. A brief conclusion both summarizes the findings and looks at the influence of Parmenides' method on subsequent thinkers, particularly Empedocles . A translation of the whole poem is appended, which is useful for clarifying C's understanding of individual passages. I miss, however, the presence of either indices or bibliography, especially since a host of works are criticized in the body of the work. The Introduction (9-75), entitled "Le mythe des multiples chemins," deals primarily with the leitmotiv of the whole poem, the "way" or '~journey" (hodos,keleuthos). A major problem for students of Parmenides has always been how to reconcile the Goddess's statement in Fr. a that there are just two "ways," that of "is" and that of "is not," the latter of which is a "path wholly unlearnable" (panapeuth~satarpos), with the emergence of the Way of Seeming, which the Goddess has promised to teach the Youth just before this, at the end of Ft. 1, and then does teach him in the second part of the poem. Is the Way of Seeming really a third path, or is it a byway of the first or the second, or what are we to think? C. is right, I think, to seek to dissolve this puzzle by pointing out that there are [461] 462 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF enILOSOPHY 27:3 JULY 198 9 many more than two hodoienvisaged in the poem as a whole (36ff.), such as the journey from Darkness to Light undertaken by the Youth himself, and the wanderings of the akritaphyla in Fr. 6. Indeed, Jean Fr~re is already on record as distinguishing four. But C. himself goes rather overboard on this, ultimately distinguishing no less than ten, and rejoicing in this as a good Pythagorean number. On the other hand, his analysis of the meaning of myth in a Parmenidean context, drawing on the insights of such thinkers as Vernant and D~tienne, is most useful. All too often no clear distinction is made between mythical and allegorical discourse, and which of these Parmenides is employing . In fact, though his connections with epic, and with Hesiod in particular, are universally recognized (being explored very fully by Mourelatos, for one), the way in which Parmenides transposes the genealogictradition of the epic into his myth as of the "way" has not been investigated, I think, with such acuteness as C. employs here. The body of the book is a detailed...