Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Parmenides -> Ideengeschichte zu den Sophiesten: der Wissende, Logos/Nous, Sein; Anaxagoras

Kurzinhalt: In the complex of Parmenidean speculation three ideas can be distinguished from which lines of meaning run through the sophistic age into the fourth century

Textausschnitt: 366b In the complex of Parmenidean speculation three ideas can be distinguished from which lines of meaning run through the sophistic age into the fourth century. The first is the idea of the "knowing man," an existential category denoting the type of man who is capable of insights concerning Being. The second is the idea of the autonomous Logos that will arrive at truth about Being independent of the manifold of deceptive appearances. The third is the idea of correlation between thinking and being, identifying that which is with what can be thought. With the first of the ideas we shall not deal specifically in the present context because the emergence of the philosopher as a new existential type is the general problem of the age, from the generation of the mystic-philosophers, through the variety of sophistic types, to the climax in Socrates and the founders of schools in his wake. Only the lines that start from the second and third of the Parmenidean ideas will be traced.1 (Fs)

367a Among the fragments of Anaxagoras there is preserved a sentence that can be considered the declaration of independence of the mind from the rest of being:

The other things contain of all a part; the Nous, however, is something unlimited [apehon] and self-ruling [autokrates], and is mixed with no other thing, but is alone for itself. (B 12)
367b The autonomy of the Nous is asserted in this sentence even more forcefully than by Parmenides. The earlier thinker's predicates of Being and Truth, "well-rounded" and "eternal," indicated a self-contained remoteness, a resting within itself; Anaxagoras, while preserving these shades of meaning, adds a quality of action, of dynamism, through the predicate "self-ruling." This increased volume of sovereignty is due to a decisive change in the ontological status of the Nous. The Parmenidean Nous was the organ of cognition for Being; the Nous of Anaxagoras has become a part of being, though its highest ranking, sovereign part. And this "finest" and "purest" among things is, furthermore, the ordering force for all other things from the universal revolution and the celestial bodies to the qualitatively differentiated manifold of all things; it is especially the ruler of everything that has psyche, the greater as well as the smaller beings; and it can exert this ordering and ruling function because it has complete knowledge (gnome) of everything, and of all things has the greatest power (B 12). (Fs)