Scientific Enlightenment, Div. One
Book 2: Human Enlightenment of the First Axial

2.B. 1. A genealogy of the philosophic enlightenment in classical Greece
Chapter 8: Parmenides' Cosmogony
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Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005 by Lawrence C. Chin. All rights reserved.



How Parmenides' experiential base, articulated on the plane of logic, naturally corresponds to the historical truth of the Universe: When the recall of the memory of the first law is all by itself, the governance of the second law (Becoming: genesis and dissolution [oleqroV]) becomes completely illusory: doxa, usually meaning the "opinions" of ordinary people. Even in the model of the creation of the Universe ex nihilo, i.e. as vacuum fluctuation blown up by inflation, the utter reality of the singularity-origin (Eon/ Being by itself) is the utter reality of the vacuum (without even space-time, that is), and Becoming, which is the fluctuation that becomes the Universe, is illusory because it is always cancelled out, i.e. through the negativity of gravity. This is logic, i.e. the consequence of the law of Conservation. Hence the coincidence between Parmenides and theoretical physics /cosmology. Parmenides' original experiential base: Singularity (Parmenides' Eon) is the beginning and the end of becoming: beings must come from conservedness of no-particular-beings and must end in conservedness of no-particular-beings. "Despite all changes, all genesis and dissolution of the particulars, nothing really changes": this "nothing changes" is both the beginning and the end, so the middle is complete illusion, extraneous, a temporary imbalance already evened out or to be evened out -- and thinking outside the materialistic talk of being evened out and going deep into the meaning of existence as necessarily illusory because of the firs law, not even a temporary imbalance but really nothing at all.

Conservation by itself cannot have any characteristics, hence singularity: no time characteristics (no genesis, no perishing, no duration, total self-identity, i.e. no more of itself any where in itself and so the spherical analogy, and no otherness beside itself.

Becoming of the cosmos around then is complete illusion: mortals (brotoi, i.e. ordinary people) do not bother to carry their memory of the first law (behind the sensible world of becoming ordained by the second law) to its logical conclusion and disengage the first from the second law altogether.

With Parmenides we have come to the essence of the second mode of salvation proper to the Greeks (and also to the Indian and, somewhat, to the Chinese as well [Daoism]). Despising the empirical world as odieux is the distinguishing mark of the second mode all around (Daoism aside). The world of becoming is hated, odieux, because of its perishableness ordained by the second law, and also because of its illusory nature.

Le jeune homme [Parménide], par le discours de la Déesse, se trouvera détrompé, et ainsi se trouvera justifié ce dédain du monde qui l'en a, initialement, detaché, et l'a fait suivre un voie qui soit "en dehors du sentier battu". (Ibid., p. 188)

(The young man, i.e. Parmenides, by the words of the goddess, becomes dis-illusioned , and thus is justified this disdain for the world which (disdain) has initially extricated him from the world, and prompted him to follow the way that is outside of the "trodden, beaten way [of the mortals; patoV.]")

La tromperie fait partie de l'essence même du monde, en tant que paraissant nécessairement réel aux mortels, en tant que monde-des-mortels... mais il faut entendre par là non pas une tromperie simplement possible, mais une tromperie dans laquelle les mortels s'engluent nécessairement. (Ibid., p. 189)

(The deceitfulness is part of the very essence of the world, which appears necessarily real to the mortals, as the world-of-the mortals... But this is not a deceitfulness simply possible, but a deceitfulness to which the mortals are necessarily glued. [The first fault of the mortals.])

In this way Parmenides is not only prefiguring the path toward Plato ("theory of forms" and the empirical reality as not real), but also reminds of the Hindu and finally Buddhist philosophy in India. This dismissal of the world as un-real -- together with the displeasure with it -- marks up the essential characteristic of the second mode of salvation, to which, on the Chinese side, Daoist philosophy (Laozi and Zhuangzi) can only loosely be assimilated, and the testamental religions of the first mode (e.g. Christianity) is definitely opposed (except for, e.g. the strand of gnosticism developed within).

But this illusory world of becoming itself has a structure, and Parmenides wants to explicate it (according to the revelation of the goddess) so that mortals, even on this point, cannot surpass him. (wV ou mh pote tiV se brotwn gnwmh parelasshi. Frag 8, 61.) This is because he is no longer mortal like the others, but immortal, saved, has reached divinity: he who does not believe in the world and knows it to be an illusion should know this world better than the mortals themselves who believe in it, just as the liberated philosopher in Plato's allegory of the cave who has returned to the cave somehow knows the shadows better than the prisoners of the cave do because he has seen the "original".

In this way Parmenides is following his predecessors in that, after the exposition of the arche, i.e. the origin according to the memory of the first law of thermodynamics, the philosopher proceeds to expose the structure of the becoming cosmos that comes from this origin -- cosmogony -- but with two differences here: first, because with Parmenides the origin as implicit in the memory of the first law is recalled all by itself, there is no longer any necessity why the cosmos should come to be from this origin at all -- from the fact of conservedness nothing is implied -- and Parmenides nowhere explains why this illusory world should come to be at all -- probably because there is no reason. ("l'être, qui n'est pas un principe, ne 'fonde' rien... du fait qu'il y a [there is, what is, "Is"] ne peut en aucune façon se déduire qu'il devait y avoir ce qu'il y a." Conche, ibid., p. 189.) Second, unlike the Ionian physicists who really try to explain the natural phenomena of the cosmos around them, as a matter of empiricistic speculation if one may call it, Parmenides sees that the philosopher may never really know how exactly the cosmos is generated, and so he offers his cosmogony merely as a likely scenario, a likely myth, a likely arrangement-in-world (diakosmon eoikota). This corresponds roughly to today's "educated guess". The disengagement of the empiricistic, common-sense, pure explanatory speculation from the compact myth about the origin of things has apparently ended up, with Parmenides, returning to the realm of myth, due to the philosopher's awareness of human limitation -- but then at least Parmenides is conscious of the mythicality of cosmogony.

The structure of the cosmos is: When the underlying common essence of all particulars is differentiated from these particulars, it is the fundamental binarity that governs the manifestations of all the particulars: thi men flogoV aiqerion pur ("the aither fire of flame", Frag. 8, 56) which is gentle, mild, soft (hpion), thin/ clear (araion), and self-identical in every respect (ewutwi pantosse twuton) -- this is something like the masculine principle -- and the other is, nukt'adah (ignorant night, nuit sans clarté according to Conche), body thick and heavy (pukinon demaV embriqeV te -- something like the feminine principle. Thus Parmenides' cosmogony is the exact replay of the ying-yang picture of Chinese cosmogony as found in the yijing metaphysics. Not surprisingly, since ying-yang binarity is just common sense of the functional perspective and conditioned by the thermodynamic structure of the Universe.

The cosmos is the world taken to be real by the doxa, translated earlier as illusion, but it means literally the opinions of the mortals, of the ordinary people. (Doxa corresponds to maya on the Indic side.) The first law is the immovable and inviolable logic, always true: "... la vérité. Ce discours, portant sur l'être même, immuable et éternel, est vrai pour toujours [the necessity of Conservation]. Au contraire, le discours sur la doxa, qui vient après, ainsi appelé parce qu'il porte sur les doxai des mortels, peut cesser un jour d'être vrai: ce sera le cas lorsque son objet, le monde, cessera d'être -- cédant la place non certes au non-être [because all must be conserved, and cannot just disappear] mais à un autre mode [conserved back to the equilibrium/ substratum]. Ce qui n'est que pour un temps, quoi que n'étant pas absolument rien -- auquel cas, il serait innommable et impensable -- n'est pas vraiment. Par rapport au Réel, il est irréel; et il n'a que la réalité de l'irréel... le monde n'a pas la réalité qu'ils lui attribuent: il est réellement irréel, parce que fait de choses évanouissantes, et lui-même évanouissant." (Conche, ibid., p. 188; "... the truth. This discourse, bearing on Being itself, immovable and eternal, is true for-ever. On the contrary, the discourse on doxa, which comes after, and thus so-called because it bears on the doxai of the mortals, can cease one day being true: that will be the case when its object, the world, ceases being -- ceding its place certainly not to non-being [non-being cannot be, as -- for now let's say -- all must be conserved, and cannot just disappear] but to another mode. What cannot be except for a short time, even though it is not absolutely nothing -- in which case it would be unnamable and unthinkable -- is not really. In comparison with the Real, it is unreal; and it has no reality except of the unreal... the world does not have the reality that they [the mortals, ordinary people] attribute to it: it is really unreal, because it is made of things quickly vanishing, and itself quickly vanishing.") For now, we say that the truth of ordinary things is that they will be conserved in conservedness, where there is no-thing at all. But later on, when studying Buddhism, we'll have occasion to note just how close Parmenides' thinking here approaches the Nibbana of Buddha.

But the fault of the mortals is more than this, it is double: (1) believing that the world of becoming is real; (2) unable to unify the opposites in becoming, and therefore unable to derive genesis at all.

morfaV gar kateqento duo gnwmaV onomazein,
twn mian ou crewn estin, en wi peplanhmenoi eisin
. (Frag 8, 53-4)

The mortals lay down and decided well to name two forms (morphas, i.e. the flaming light and obscure darkness of night),
out of which it is necessary not to make one, and in this they are led astray.

Conche comments: "la séparation de la lumière et de l'obscurité, du jour et de la nuit, du chaud et du froid, est l'opposition primordiale qui s'impose à tous les hommes, et en fonction de laquelle leur vie se trouve réglée." (ibid., p. 190) "Ce qu'entend dire Parménide, observe Simplicius, c'est que 'se sont trompés ceux qui ne voient pas l'unité dans l'opposition des éléments provoquant la génération' (touV thn antiqesin twn thn genesin sunistwntwn stoiceiwn mh sunorwntaV, Phys., 31. 8-9)" (ibid., p. 191: "What Parmenides is trying to say, observes Simplicius, is that those are fooled who cannot see the unity in the opposition of elements provoking generation.") The philosophers preceding Parmenides, whether the Ionian physicists or Heraclitus, i.e. those immanent pantheists, have been able to see the unity of the opposites into which the world is divided -- although they could not yet, as Parmenides has, extricate that unity from all becoming altogether. "C'est une telle unité que le commun des mortels manque à percevoir, se bornant à voir l'un à côté de l'autre les contraires qu'il faudrait penser en un pour saisir le monde dans son engendrement, et non simplement comme un résultat." (ibid., p. 192; "It is such unity which the community of the mortals fails to perceive, being taken up to seeing one next to the other the contraries which it is necessary to think as one in order to grasp the world in its genesis, and not simply as a result.") The step to enlightenment is thus two-fold: to think the contraries as One (Ionian pantheism), and furthermore to think of the One not just immanently but transcendentally so that the world, though One, is simply not-real. Thus the pantheists have not yet completed the project.

faoV and nux -- light and night -- in which everything in the cosmos participates, more or less so according to its nature. A full exposition of the meaning of this can thus be gained by the study of the Yijing metaphysics flourishing during the Sung Dynasty in China (c.f. later).

For now some general comments. This differentiation of the two principles is in accordance with the functional perspective, i.e. the differentiation of the essence of all functional entities (effects) from these particular functional entities. Of course, light/ rare/ thin/ hot is (roughly) the effect of the fast molecular mobility of the structures underneath the phenomenon in question, while dark/ heavy/ cold is (roughly) the effect of the slow molecular mobility. Again, the structure is not known to early consciousness dwelling in the functional perspective, so manifestations, on the surface, of the molecular mobility underneath are differentiated into their basic polar parts, corresponding to either fast or slow molecular mobility beneath, and these differentiated polar parts are taken as fundamental and elemental. Afterall, all things either have fast molecular mobility within (like air or liquid) or slow (like solids). "Ce qui est léger, peu dense et chaud, a part au lumineux; ce qui est lourd, dense et froid est plus chargé de nuit. Il y a une unification des forces naturelles, ramenées à deux grands principes antagonistes." (Ibid., p. 199; "What is light [weight], less dense and hot, has more part in the luminous [i.e. yang]; what is heavy, dense and cold is more embodied by night [ying]. There is an unification of the natural forces, led to the two grand antagonistic principles.")

These two principles are somewhat of an advance from the four elements insofar as the four are further differentiated according to their essence into two only (fire and air obviously correspond to light, earth and water to night). But Parmenides would not expect us to take the principles of the doxa of an illusory world seriously:

Le feu-lumière et la nuit ne sont que les deux "formes" nommées par les mortels, et avec lesquelles la Déesse se fait fort d'expliquer le monde mieux que n'importe quel mortel. Mais le fait que les mortels soient seuls responsables de cette nomination signifie qu'il faut se garder d'ontologiser les morphai. La Déesse garde ses distances: simplement de ces "formes"... mais qui sont des principes ad hoc pour l'explication de ce monde-ci, et que rien ne permet d'absolutiser en dehors de ce monde. Y aura-t-il toujours la lumière et toujours la nuit? Les mortels le croient. Mais c'est que, pour eux, le monde est là pour toujours. Or, cela est faux... Les deux principes ne sont ni périssables ni impérissables: ils sont mélangeables. (Ibid., p. 200)

(The fire-light and night are nothing but the two "forms" named by the mortals, and with which the Goddess sets herself to explain the world better than which-ever mortal. But the fact that the mortals are the only ones responsible for such naming signifies that it is necessary to guard oneself against ontologizing the morphai. The Goddess keeps her distance: simply from these "forms"... which are ad hoc principles for the explication of this world, and which nothing permits absolutizing beyond this world. Will there always be light and night? The mortals believe so. But that's because, for them, the world is always there. Now, this is false... The two principles [of ying and yang] are neither perishable nor imperishable: they are mixable. [All translations mine])

Parmenides' cosmogony (as revealed by the goddess: Fragment 10) next sets out to explain the origin of the sun, moon, their workings, the heaven, why necessarily (bound by Ananke) it envelopes the stars, how earth, sun, moon, aither, the "heavenly milk" (gala ouranion, the milky way?), the extreme Olympia, and the forces (menoV) of the stars are set in motion to come into being. In the words of Simplicius: "the genesis of things that are born and perish, until the parts of living beings" (twn ginomenwn kai fqeiromenwn mecri twn moriwn twn zwiwn thn genesin. Ibid., p. 210) The totality of the phenomena of the cosmos (ta fainomena panta, as Plutarch explains; ibid., p. 211) is to be derived from the mixing of the elemental light and darkness. One can simply consult the Yijing metaphysics for how this works. Although Parmenides will introduce the goddess (daimon) as doing the genesis from the mixing, it is, so to speak, metaphorical -- Parmenides is consciously making a likely myth -- for Parmenides takes the process of genesis from mixing to be natural process, in keeping with the empiricistic, mechanistic spirit of the Ionian predecessors (ibid.).

The structure of the cosmos thus generated in this likely myth is recollected by Aetius:

ParmenidhV stefanaV einai peripeplegmenaV epallhlouV, thn men ek tou araiou thn de ek tou puknou, miktaV de allaV ek fwtoV kai skotouV metaxu toutwn kai to periecon de pasaV teicouV dikhn stereon uparcein, uf'wi purwdhV stefanh. kai to mesaitaton paswn peri o palin purwdhV. twn de summigwn thn mesaitathn apasaiV tokea pashV kinhsewV kai genesewV uparcein, hntina kai daimona kubernhtin kai klhdoucon eponomazei dikhn te kai anagkhn. (Aetius, II, 7, 1. Ibid., p. 215)

Parmenides says that there are coronas (stephanas) one enveloping or encircling another, one formed of rare [yang], and the other of dense [ying], others, mixed form of light and darkness, are in the middle. And Parmenides provides, surrounding all these, a [corona like a] wall of some kind, solid and just (teicouV dikhn stereon), under which is a corona of fire. And what is in the most center of all this [the core, kernel of the cosmos in the corona form] is again encircled by [a corona] of fire. And he provides the most middle [layer of corona] of the mixed coronas as the progenitor (tokea), for all [beings], of all the movements and all the generations. He calls this [middle progenitor layer of corona] the goddess (daimona) that governs (kubernhtin: governing, steering, guiding) or that holds the key, or Justice (diken) or Necessity (ananke).

The structure of the cosmos looks thusly:

(Taken from Conche, ibid., p. 218.)

"Ce que nous présente Parménide est un mythe cosmogonique, ancêtre du mythe du Timée. De même que le Demiurge du Timée produit des formes nouvelles par le mélange en proportions réglées d'éléments préexistants, de même la daimon parménidienne, à partir de couronnes de Feu et de Nuit supposées données, procède par mélanges à la génération des êtres." (Ibid., p. 219) This goddess is governing, steering: "La daimon parménidienne préside aux mélanges de manière que, dans l'ensemble, le Feu et la Nuit fassent jeu égal et que le système soit en équilibre." (Ibid.) This harks back to Anaximander's image of justice as beings paying compensation to each other for their respective injustices toward each other. Although the human experience of the cosmos is definitively permeated with the degenerative effects of the second law of thermodynamics -- and so "becoming" becomes an evil which must be negated or from which one must extricate oneself through the first law: salvation -- the orderliness of the cosmos and intuition of equilibrium nevertheless remind one of the first law, which is then perceived to be governing, in some way, the process of becoming itself. (And of course it does, at the atomic/ energetic level, but the ancient people did not know this.) That all things must eventually be evened out to equilibrium bestows upon the philosopher of the functional perspective the notion of justice, necessity, that the becoming of the world would not favor one being at the expense of the other, that equilibrium, equality, will be conserved among the beings becoming. ("[La daimon] est appelée 'Justice', car elle n'avantage pas l'un des contraires aux dépens de l'autre, et 'Nécessité', car elle proportionne les parts de l'un et de l'autre comme l'exige la nature des phénomènes ou des êtres." [Ibid.]) Ananke (Necessity) furthermore metaphorically expresses the inexorableness of Logic, of the thermodynamic laws. This trend of thought, started with Anaximander, would be seen again most forcibly expressed by Heraclitus, the immediate predecessor of Parmenides.

Also, "La divinité détient les 'clefs' du réel en devenir, des lors qu'elle gouverne la proportion des parts de lumière et de nuit. Ainsi s'explique qu'il y ait ceci plutôt que cela, que le monde soit ainsi plutôt qu'autrement, qu'il y ait ce monde et non un autre." (Ibid.)

This daimon, corresponding to Heraclitus' theos, in governing, steering all, is at the origin of the "hated" genesis and mixing of all beings. (pantwn gar stugeroio tokou kai mixioV arcei. stugeroio means hated, abominated. Conche translates as odieux.) The goddess furthermore sends females to mix with males and vice versa, another "hated" event.

Becoming is hated, odieux, because of its precariousness and brevity. (Ibid., p. 226) "Mais c'est toutes choses qui sont 'odieusement' enfantées, et, la mort étant inséparable de la naissance, le domaine de la mort s'étend à l'ensemble des étants. Ce qui est 'odieux' ou 'haïssable' ou 'horrible' dans la vie, c'est la mort. Or, tout ce qui est en devenir est voué à la dissolution. C'est donc sur le devenir comme tel que porte la condamnation du philosophe." (Ibid., p. 227) This is the horrible state of affairs ordained by the second law of thermodynamics: senseless generation, inescapable disintegration of order, the negation of which (and ultimately not just escape from which) constitutes salvation. Again, how closely Parmenides -- and later Plato following him -- approaches Buddha: birth itself is hateful, odious.

But daimon also distributes parts, lots (aisa, meros) to the mortals: justice as equilibrium.

Daimon furthermore produces the god Eros, which results in the union of the sexes. This is bad (from the perspective of the philosopher who has salvation in mind). For Parmenides (following the more or less universal experience of humanity at the time), man is of more light, and woman of more night, obscurity. Ying is female and yang is male. Although fire is part of becoming and so hardly of Being by itself, it is nonetheless that part of the becoming which has intelligence (noen), more of the divinity, and approaches more the Eternal Being -- closer to immortality: how the effects of fast molecular mobility remind of Conservation. Union of the sexes, and especially (so conceived) the seduction of the female, is thus always experienced as negative and lamentable (in addition to the necessity to labor to feed "the wife and the children", noted earlier), like the "Fall" into mortality, not just here in the Greek mode of salvation that is disengaging from mythic shamanism, but universally in all salvational movements of ancient time. (Another reason is of course the need, for the sake of salvation, to maintain desireless minor salvation.) Hence asceticism, abstention from women in all the mystic cults. (But one must note that here Eros is not among the demiurgos, the primordial, first generation gods, as is with Hesiod.)

Given the importance of abstention from the female sex within the mystic cult of salvation (which, of course, is mostly the business of men at this time) it is not surprising that Parmenides would have a place in his cosmogony for the generation of the sexes. As Conche summarizes:

"Selon Anaxagore et Parménide, le sperme en provenance du testicule droit est projeté dans la partie droite de l'utérus, celui en provenance du testicule gauche dans la partie gauche; s'il y a interversions dans la projection, ce sont des femelles qui naissent." (Aetius, V, 7, 4...)

...mais il peut arriver qu'il [le sperme] soit projeté de la droite vers la gauche ou de la gauche vers la droite. Puisque les parties droites donnent des mâles et les parties gauches des femelles, on a, d'après ce témoignage, des mâles dans un seul cas et des femelles dans les trois autres cas -- étant entendu que, dans le cas où le sperme issu des parties droites aboutit dans les parties gauches, ladite "femelle" n'est qu'un mâle efféminé...

de parties droites à parties droites ---- males
de parties gauches à parties droites ---- femelles
de parties gauches à parties gauches ---- femelles
de parties droites à parties gauches ---- femelles (mâles efféminés) (Ibid., p. 259)

("According to Anaxagoras and Parmenides, the sperm originating from the right testicle is shot into the right part of the uterus, and that originating from the left testicle into the left part; if there is inversion in this projection, it is then females which are born."

... But it could happen that the sperm is shot from the right toward the left or from the left toward the right. Since the right sides produce males and left sides females, one has, according to this witness, males in one case only and females in three other cases -- it being understood that, in the case where the sperm issued from the right sides reaches the left sides, the so-called "female" is simply an effeminate male...

from right sides to right sides --- males
from left sides to right sides --- females
from left sides to left sides --- females
from right sides to left sides -- females [effeminate males])

In human experience (but maybe only, and so at least, since agriculturalism, i.e. the Neolithic Revolution) male is experienced as right and female as left, this basic Ying-Yang dichotomy, and is the same as light vs. darkness, heaven (fire) vs. earth; this basic opposition where the positive, right side is identified as male and the negative as female. Hence in mythic thinking the identification is usually, but not always, of the heaven with the father and the earth with the mother. The right side is the orthodox and represents order and the left side is heterodox and represents disorder. The origin of this experience (sexist or not, it is quite universal) we have already seen with respect to Nancy Jay's explication of the function of the male sacrificial religiousness as "remedy for having been born of women" (Throughout Your Generations Forever): in the male counter-religiousness such as in ancestor-cult men's birth became a "spiritual birth" (reincarnation by the ancestor anima as the manner of the continuity of the [male] lineage) while women's birth remained "material birth" (physical birth-giving as the manner of the continuity of the lineage), which was ominous, because the spirit (anima), as order (local concentration), was apt to reach equilibrium with the material flesh (and thus disintegrate!) which was thus evil, i.e. represented the operation of the linear entropy-increase of the second law. The origin may further extend back into the evolution toward Homo sapiens sapiens, where right-handedness came to predominate due to the lateralization of the brain in favor of the development of language. Whether language evolved from the female side (as Camilla Power and Chris Knight speculate, c.f. Ch. 6 of A Thermd. Interprt. of Hist., "The Origin of The Sexual Division of Labor") or was selected for by the females on the male side (c.f. Andrew Lehman at The Serpent Foundation), language, rightness, the specialization of the left brain in less contact with the right brain, and the associated analytical thinking and time-envisioning (e.g. planning events in the future) all became the characteristic male trait. Women became the left, with opposite characteristics. Women became the Other, the heterodox, as night, as disorder, as the irrational, as the negative side of every binary. This otherization of the female is not merely due to male domination in human perspective, and not merely because the female has progressively been left outside of the predominant trend of human evolution: abstract, analyticalization has been the recent trend of human evolution and this trend has taken place among the male side; and all progress, rather all peculiarities which set Homo sapiens sapiens apart from other species, have been consequent on this trend. (Evolution toward Homo sapiens sapiens, i.e. within the Homo lineages, was mostly dominated by the trend of the evolution of the females, their struggle to deal with the encephalization of the infant -- females evolved new forms while males did not. But with the Homo sapiens sapiens the evolutionary trend became dominated by males -- males evolved new forms while females did not. This is probably due to female solicitation of male parental efforts. C.f. Chapter 6 of our Thermodynamic Interpretation of History.) Rather, the otherization of females has deep existentially experiential root: i.e. co-determined by the experiences of thermodynamics and the sexual division of labor initiated by the female solicitation of male provisioning: women were more tied down by their biology -- more concerned with reproduction and so eating and consumption in general; their continuation was also through the flesh, rather than through the spirit as in male sacrificial religiousness. In this way while men were more of the spirit, more of the rational, thus more of the order stabilized away from the material, environmental equilibrium which women represent, more in the negation of their biological fate determined by the second law, and more taken up by the anamnesis of Conservation as the hidden clue to salvation; women were more of the immanent, more of the material, and, as the equilibrium state of Nature-environment, more of the irrational and disorder, and thus more of the senseless genesis and dissolution ordained by the second law. (Recall Simone de Beauvoir's identification of male with transcendence and female with immanence in The Second Sex.)

Dans quelles conditions le sperme issu des parties droites (du testicule droit) est-il projeté dans les parties droites (de l'utérus), auquel cas on a des males vrais? D'après un témoignage d'Aetius...

"Selon Empédocle, c'est la chaleur qui fait naître des mâles et le froid des femelles... Selon Parménide, c'est l'inverse: les régions septentrionales, parce qu'elles participent davantage au dense, produisent des mâles, et les régions méridionales, en raison de leur moindre densité, des femelles...

Ainsi Parménide et quelques autres affirment que les femmes sont plus chaudes que les hommes pour la raison que les menstrues sont dues à la chaleur et à l'abondance du sang, alors qu'Empédocle soutient le contraire" (Part. an., II, 2, 648 a 28 s).

Mais, à la vérité, que les femmes soient physiologiquement plus chaudes que les hommes, ou qu'elles aient davantage besoin de chaleur pour leur conception, est compatible avec le fait d'avoir plus de part à la nuit qu'à la lumière et avec leur appartenance au royaume de l'ombre. Nous avons vu, en effet, que tous les étants qui composent le cosmos sont des mixtes: ils ont part à la fois au Feu-lumière et à la Nuit. Dès lors, les femmes peuvent être, selon les fonctions considérées, plus chaudes et plus en affinité avec le Feu que les hommes, ou, au contraire, plus froides et plus en affinité avec le dense, la silence et la nuit. Si le froid favorise la naissance des mâles et la chaleur celle des femelles, les premières de ces fonctions sont celles en liaison avec le sexe, les secondes celles en rapport avec la raison et le langage. Les femmes peuvent être plus chaudes sexuellement, plus froides intellectuellement, alors que, pour les hommes, c'est le contraire. Or, ce qui est essentiel, pour un Grec, est la pensée logique: de là l'appartenance des mâles au "domaine de la lumière". (Ibid., p. 259- 260)

Furthermore on Parmenides' "heredity". (1) Semen comes from blood. (2) Both the masculine and feminine semen play a role in procreation. (3) The two contrary semen, after intercourse, fight in the womb. "Le corps résultant de l'union sera 'bien constitué' si les qualités propre à chaque semence... réalisent, dans leur opposition même, une complémentarité... Mais si la juste proportion des éléments du mélange n'est pas respectée... le trouble, la désharmonie s'installent dans le corps, le sexe, et de là dans le tempérament, le caractère, le cours des désirs et des pensées." (Ibid., p. 263) This is the very Greek concern of Parmenides with the constitution of a temperant, balanced, harmonious personality. At this classical age one does not want a virago (in whom the male semen triumphs over the female) or a effeminate man (in whom the female triumphs over the male). Both of these "wrong" types then seem to have two causes in the Parmenidean heredity: semen projected into the wrong side of the uterus, and the predominance of the wrong semen opposite to the gender of the person.


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