Parmenides on opinion
Parmenides has a strange relationship with “the opinions of mortals.”
On the one hand, they are clearly false. “Mortals have made up their minds to name two forms, one of which they should not name, and that is where they go astray from the truth.” By “two forms” he seems mainly to mean light and dark, but it’s really the idea of duality itself he has a problem with. Dark, presumaby, should not be granted the status of being “its own thing,” when it’s really just the not-being of light. It’s nonsense anyway to talk about what does not exist, since there’s nothing to talk about. The problem with “the opinions of mortals” is that we’ve built our entire perception of the world around these dualities, sometimes even turning them into elaborate and sophisticated sciences in their own right.
And yet for some reason I don’t understand it’s important to learn these opinions. Not just important—the goddess says it is necessary. The narrator must learn the opinions of mortals alongside the truth, even though there’s no reason to trust them (οὐκ ἔνι πίστις ἀληθής).
The clearest reason we’re given is ὡς οὐ μή ποτέ τίς σε βροτῶν γνώμη παρελάσσῃ, which I’m initially tempted to read as meaning, basically, “so nobody can make you look stupid.” Maybe learning the opinions of mortals is a kind of survival tactic, a practical necessity given that most people are not privy to the kind of divine knowledge the narrator has.
But I’m not quite convinced by that cynical interpretation. The goddess also adds this cryptic tidbit:
ἀλλ᾽ ἔμπης καὶ ταῦτα μαθήσεαι, ὡς τὰ δοκοῦντα χρῆν δοκίμως εἶναι διὰ παντὸς πάντα περῶντα.
My Greek isn’t good enough for this, but it sure sounds to me like some stronger claim is being made here on behalf of the way things appear to be (τὰ δοκοῦντα). It sounds like the goddess might even be saying that the appearances are actually in some strange way true, though that contradicts everything else Parmenides says. My ignorant attempt to translate it would go something like:
But nevertheless, you’ll learn these things [the opinions of mortals] too: how it was necessary that the appearances really exist, pervading everything.
The two translations I have to look at right now are not much help. Richard McKirahan has:
But nevertheless you will learn these too–how it were right that the things that seem be reliably, being indeed, the whole of things.
What does that even mean? “How it were right that the things that seem be reliably”?
The public domain John Burnet translation has:
Yet none the less shalt thou learn these things also,–how passing right through all things one should judge the things that seem to be.
I think what Burnet is trying to get at here is that the goddess wants to give the narrator a way of understanding how mortal opinion went wrong. That fits much more easily with everything else Parmenides says, but it looks to me like a pretty willful rendering of the Greek.
And then there’s the fact that, in the opening scene, the narrator is being flown through the night sky by the daughters of the sun, to where Justice protects the gate between dark and light. It may be that this is all just the narrator’s own immersion in mortal opinion that he is learning to overcome, but that seems too easy. The duality of truth and opinion seems to be inscribed into the cosmos itself.
Maybe there are well-worn explanations for my confusions here; I haven’t read any of the literature. But to me, for now, this instability makes Parmenides much more interesting.