Becoming Being: On Parmenides' Transformative Philosophy (review)

Robbiano explores what she terms the "transformative" aspects of Parmenides' hexameter poem about what-is. Her claim is twofold. First, she argues that Parmenides uses epic language and literary strategies to transform the reader into the thinker who ultimately knows all things. Second, she maintains that the "becoming being" of her title is literal: the thinker who knows Being finally becomes Being (her upper case). The two parts of her project do not always ride easily with one another (and Robbiano hints in her preface that the second aspect was a later addition to a project that began as a dissertation), and the first is, I think, more successful than the second.

A virtue of the book is Robbiano's attention to the Proem (DK 28B1). She returns to it several times, adding layers to her interpretation as she works through its thirty-two lines (using the text of Diels-Kranz). In this, her own strategy mirrors the one that she attributes to Parmenides and his goddess-narrator: the point of the poem "unfolds" as a reader works through the poem, catching the references and similarities to other ancient works, as well as the internal points of contact among the fragments and their arguments. Her analysis of the narrative "I" of B1.1–23 and the "you" to whom the goddess speaks (from B1.24 to the end of the poem) is persuasive: the reader is brought into the presence of the goddess, and the commands to listen, carry away the story, judge by reasoning, and so on are addressed to the reader as well as to the kouros. Not only must he cease to be a passive hearer and become an active thinker, so must we, who stand with him.

Robbiano stresses the importance of the routes of inquiry, which ties in with her view that we are to give up a mortal perspective and take on the goddess' view of Being. This, too, seems correct, and part of Parmenides' revolutionary thought. In doing this we will adopt a certain kind of monism:

The goddess advises the 'you' to look at what is the same in everything. Therefore monism is not incompatible with dialogical situation, nor with the existence of people, . . . nor finally with the usefulness of another perspective that recognizes differences. Parmenides is a monist: noein is the same as einai—if and when one manages to focus with one's nous on Being, to understand it and to become one with it.

(129)

The problem is to understand what this means. Robbiano has lovely arguments linking the signs at the beginning of B8 with Parmenides' rejection of earlier Presocratic cosmologies, and I think her view that Parmenides finds genuine change in fundamental entities impossible (and thus rejects earlier cosmologies) is correct. But when she tries to explain what Being is, and how we become one with it through changing our lives and following a way of inquiry, things become unclear. (It is here that the two parts of the project seem to clash with one another.) She links an understanding of Being with the "fullness of what-is" at B8.24 (130–33) and refers to B16. Yet B16 is a physical description of the limbs of a mortal and the changes in mortal thought caused by changes in physical composition, and part of the Doxai. How does that connect with Parmenides' claim that what-is is full of what-is? What is it to become one with Being?

Robbiano accepts A. A. Long's view of the identity of thought and Being, and is attracted to Peter Kingsley's mystical Parmenides, but she has trouble linking these with her analyses of rhetorical strategy and Parmenides' arguments. She seems eager to accommodate many views on Parmenides (and is refreshingly undogmatic), but not all of these can ride easily with one another. She avoids taking a stand on the "two routes or three?" question, but then has to...