Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Parmenides, Doxa und Wahrheit -> wahre Philosophie; Problem des Herkunft des Seins -> Plato, Timaios, Inkarnation

Kurzinhalt: Truth is the philosophy of the realissimum that we experience if we follow the way of immortalization in the soul; Delusion is the philosophy of the reality that we ...

Textausschnitt: 287a The philosopher in his transport experiences the presence of a supreme reality; we may call it, as we have done before, the realissimum. The Parmenidean argument now takes the following course: (Fs) (notabene)

(1) If what is given in the experience of the "Is!" be called Being, then whatever is not given in this experience of a homogeneous presence must be called Notbeing by definition. (Fs)
(2) If the Logos is applied to this initial situation we arrive at a body of predicates about Being; and that body will be the "Truth" about Being. (Fs)
(3) All propositions that disregard the initial situation, that draw into the orbit of speculation materials that are not to be found in the experience of the "Is!," will be compelled to treat as Being what according to the initial definition is Notbeing. All such propositions are "Delusion." (Fs)

287b The conflict of Truth and Delusion, thus, is not a conflict between true and false propositions. In fact, the Delusion is quite as true as the Truth, if by truth we mean an adequate and consistent articulation of an experience. The conflict occurs between two types of experience. Truth is the philosophy of the realissimum that we experience if we follow the way of immortalization in the soul; Delusion is the philosophy of the reality that we experience as men who live and die in a world that itself is distended in time with a beginning and an end. The characterization of this philosophy of reality as a Delusion derives its justification from the experience of a superior reality, of an immortal ground of the mortal world. The conflict goes ultimately back to the experience of the mortal and immortal component parts of the soul. (Fs) (notabene)

287c The Truth is one, the doxai are many. Nevertheless, the multiplicity of doxai does not mean that the philosophy of mortal reality is an anarchic field of flights of fancy. The experience of the world is common to all mortals, and the articulation of the experience can be more or less adequate, complete, and consistent. The part on Doxa, therefore, is not, as sometimes has been assumed, an account of the opinions of other philosophers but contains Parmenides' own cosmology. The light-goddess herself gives him the information, just as she gave him the information on Truth; and she promises to tell him of the arrangement of the world (diakosmos) as all is likely (eoikota panta) (B 8.60), so that the thought of other mortals will not surpass his account (B 8.61). This conception of a "likely" account, an account that can be more or less true, of a specifically contingent truth as compared with the strict truth of the Logos, had a momentous consequence in the history of ideas in that it was continued and elaborated in the Platonic conception of the eikos mythos, the "likely" mythos or story in the Timaeus. Especially in the late work of Plato the myth became the instrument of expression for certain areas of experience that Parmenides had assigned to the Doxa. (Fs)

288a The peculiar development from the secondary position of the Doxa in Parmenides to the primary importance of the Myth in the late work of Plato is accompanied by an enrichment of the subject matter of philosophizing on which we must dwell for a moment. Parmenides juxtaposes Being and Delusion without touching the problem that the reality as given in the "Is!" and the reality of the Delusion must somehow be ontologically connected.1 Being and Delusion are not two different worlds; they are two aspects of one world that is given in two kinds of cognitive experiences of the same human being. Parmenides, however, simply describes the delusionary cosmos. The component factors of Light and Darkness pervade it all through; and because man participates in the mixture he experiences the cosmos in its delusionary dualism. Moreover, Parmenides places the gods into the delusion. At the center of the physical cosmos is a female daimon who rules its order; and this central goddess creates the other gods, Eros as "the first of them all" (B 12 and B 13). How the Being, which apparently is not God or a god, ever came by the world of Delusion including the gods remains a mystery. This mystery becomes the concern of Plato. In his myth of the cosmos he fills the empty space in the philosophy of Parmenides with the symbol of the creator-god, of the Demiurge. The Demiurge is the mediator between Being and the cosmos; he incarnates the eternal paradigm in the world. The likely Myth provides the link between Being and the world of the likely Doxa. We may venture the generalization that the late Platonic myth is primarily the instrument for expressing the incarnation of Being?and not the incarnation of Being in the physical cosmos only, but also (and this is our special interest) in the order of society and history. The part on Plato in the present study will bring a full exposition of this problem. (Fs) (notabene)