7.1 End of the Line
How far have we come? Or, given that a hodos, as we saw in Section 1.2, is durative but telic: what have we accomplished? To what destination have we arrived on this hodos dizēsios?
Throughout this project we have set our sights on Parmenides’ invention of extended deductive argumentation and the way that he established the basic conceptual footprint of what would be called demonstration: (i) proceeding from a starting point that has to be accepted (ii) by strict deductive arguments (iii) to establish an inescapable conclusion. All three components, we have seen, are made possible by, and develop under the deep influence of, the network of meanings compressed into, and emanating out from, the figure of the hodos.
To begin at the beginning (i), Parmenides inherited a pattern of Homeric deliberation that involved the thinking through of two alternatives and the rejection of one to lead to a conclusion. In the Homeric figure of the hodos and the discourse modes organized by its characteristic types of dependence, he inherited a specific discursive organization: narration, followed by description, followed by instruction (which was often – at least in the hodos spanning Od. 12.37–141 – justified by argument). Even more specifically, in lines 12.55–126 he would have encountered a number of textual elements that feature with unusual frequency: a modally charged version of description-by-negation, description made up of existential and predicative forms of einai (and esti in particular), and the use of gar and epei to articulate the relationship between premises and the imperatives to action that formed Circe’s conclusions. The audience of the Homeric poem encounters in this segment of Circe’s hodos a special kind of choice, one between two courses in physical space: a choice between two mutually incompatible, exhaustive alternatives (viz. a krisis or exclusive disjunction). Thanks to Parmenides’ reversal of the relationship between argument and description, second and third person, action and state of affairs, the Homeric pattern of deliberation, applied to this special krisis forming an exclusive disjunction, converged to form an exceptionally powerful nexus by which the rejection of one term – in typical Homeric fashion – now enforced with a modal power, mandated the selection of the other. The terms of the choice were no longer actions, however, but descriptions of what-is; and the argumentative support was not previously established descriptions, but actions whose impossibility of being performed – by any ‘you’ who should hear or read the verse – served as the self-founding basis for an entirely new sequence of argument. Homer’s krisis came in the middle of the hodos; Parmenides moved it to the very beginning of his own to force all who would listen to his goddess down the path ‘IS’: to proceed, that is to say, from a starting point that, because it cannot not be accepted, must therefore be accepted by all comers.
Point (ii) encompasses no more and no less than the invention of extended deductive argumentation. The rhetorical schema of the hodos governs a form of catalogic discourse that orders a series of items enumerated on the basis of their contiguity in space and the movement of a voyager in time, a combination we termed con-sequence. The discursive architecture structured by the hodos is thus systematic, linking each item within the same catalogue and organizing their interrelationships on the basis of this principle of con-sequence; insofar as its types of dependence accommodate argumentative support justifying claims made in the timeless present (and with the predicative esti) of description, it also provides a framework that makes possible more than mere assertion. By transforming the items his hodos catalogues from nodes on the itinerary of a journey through physical space – and in many cases, narrative episodes tied to places – to claims about the nature of what-is; by converting previous claims into supporting premises at lower levels of dependence for items later in the catalogue; by exploiting the polysemy of the word hodos (which signifies both object and action); and by harnessing the power of word and world, of the image of the physical rut road engraved in the earth, Parmenides thus transforms spatio-temporal con-sequence into logical consequence. Put schematically: the hodos, as a figure governing its own rhetorical schema, mediates a new discursive architecture that orders discourse-units and hodos-units in a systematic, cumulative way. The hodos, as a figure governing its own rhetorical schema with its own types of dependence, mediates a new discursive architecture that makes these units argumentatively justified claims about the nature of what-is. The hodos, as a signifier with a physical referent, mediates a new concept of necessary movement from point to point, unit to unit, assertion to assertion, premise to conclusion. The hodos, as a signifier whose signified intrinsically involves purposeful movement towards a destination, mediates a new concept of movement towards a final and terminal conclusion (iii). Taken together: movement towards a destination by wheeled vehicle along a graven track, through space and in time, has been transformed into a ‘metaphysical’ necessity, a hodos(-journey) whose hodos(-itinerary) moves along a hodos (rut road) in such a way that no deviation, no wandering, no swerving, no erring is possible. From sēma to sēma to sēma to sēma to …
7.2 Epi-/Apologoi: ‘Here I End My pistos logos …’?
The poem has clearly thought hard about, and finally rejected, a role for Laertes in the palace situation … His withdrawal not only disencumbers the game of a morally and strategically uncomfortable complication, but cleverly locates the zenith of emotion in the reunion with Penelope, with Laertes held in judicious reserve for an epilogue.Footnote 1
Almost as soon as they were conceived … these truly portentous ideas of Parmenides suffered a kind of breakdown, leading to what I call a Parmenidean apology, and this breakdown was portentous too.Footnote 2
We saw above (Section 1.2) that, being durative and telic, in Homer a hodos is intrinsically oriented towards an ultimate, purpose-laden destination.Footnote 3 In short, a hodos should conclude (lest it be ἀτέλεστος, ἁλίη, τηϋσίη) – finally and absolutely.
In addressing Lloyd’s point (iii), one final set of comparisons between the Odyssey and Parmenides’ ‘Route to Truth’ can prove illuminating – and provocative. In the Odyssey, the end, the climax, the culmination, the terminal point is, as everyone since the Alexandrians has known, the great olive-root bed of Odysseus, empedon sēma.Footnote 4 One can understand why Aristarchus and Aristophanes – like so many subsequent readers of the Odyssey – purportedly felt that the ‘real’ end/telos of the Odyssey was at 23.296.Footnote 5 From at least three perspectives, the conclusion, climax, culmination of Odysseus’ hodos is the olive-root bed and his reattainment of it.
7.2.1 Space, Symbol, Plot
What Hestia, the hearth, does for the ordering of space in archaic and classical Greek constructions of the oikos generally (at least on Vernant’s construction) the olive-root bed does for the oikos of Odysseus.Footnote 6 Vernant highlights three aspects of Hestia: fixity and permanence, centrality, and seclusion.Footnote 7 The bed famously embodies the first pair of characteristics: as Odysseus describes at great length and with bewildering specificity (Od. 23.190–91), he fashioned it from a living olive tree; he goes on to refer to it as ἔμπεδον (Od. 23.203)Footnote 8 and marvels at the extreme difficulty – if not impossibility – of uprooting it from the ground (Od. 23.184–86).Footnote 9 In the course of his description, the bed’s central position emerges: it was the orienting point which, thick as a pillar (πάχετος δ’ ἦν ἠΰτε κίων, Od. 23.191), dictated the construction of the entire bedchamber (23.190–94).Footnote 10 The bed is also uniquely secluded:Footnote 11 Odysseus fashioned ‘an enclosure within an enclosure; the image drawn here is that of a concentric structure, of a sealed place, of a protected inside’.Footnote 12 Penelope, the ever-vigilant guardian of the bed and bedchamber (Od. 23.226–29), has ensured that not a soul except for the loyal handmaid, the absent husband, and the faithful wife have ever entered the chamber or know of the bed.Footnote 13 And like Vernant’s Hestia, which ‘centres’ and ‘organizes’ space and helps ‘constitute the framework within which … the experience of spatiality took place’,Footnote 14 the position of Odysseus’ oikos is the central gravitational pole in the story space of the Odyssey, forever pulling back its wide-ranging master:Footnote 15 Tiresias’ prophecy suggests that, even after Odysseus’ final journey inland to the people without oars, he is to return back οἴκαδε, where the ritual must be performed (Od. 11.132–33).Footnote 16
If the bed stands like a magnet at the heart of the story space, the space it organizes is not uniform and homogenous. Several generations of scholarship après Lévi-Strauss have helped us see the manner in which the various codes that form the symbolic economy of the Odyssey work in concert to map the terrain of human life,Footnote 17 society,Footnote 18 and the houseFootnote 19 in a way that makes the bed the apex crowning its contour gradient. Insofar as the plot of the Odyssey tracks a progression to – and therefore articulates a definition of – normal human relations, social order, and household organization, the bed therefore represents the climactic item, the terminal point of the sequence. As a craft item fusing nature and culture in its unique way (Od. 23.180–203, discussed below), apotheosis and emblem par excellence of the ‘wild outdoors present within’Footnote 20 which ‘the “cultural” … holds captive in the very centre of its artifice’, the bed constitutes the ultimate taming of the wild by the civilized.Footnote 21 Similarly, insofar as ‘the ties which link Penelope, through the conjugal bed, to royalty’ mean that, ‘in the vacuum left … at the center of his kingdom by the disappearance of the king’, then ‘to be taken into Odysseus’ bed’ is to ‘step directly into the former master’s place both in the palace and the land’;Footnote 22 the bed of the absent ruler’s wife thus represents the decisive site of sociopolitical power. Thirdly, the marriage bed, as true and proper location from which the legitimate bearer of name and line is produced, becomes the rooted place where the male seed is made to bear fruit, and establishes (in the etymological sense of the word) the family line of the house of Odysseus.Footnote 23
Third comes plot. The Odyssey’s mapping of plot to space has often been observed: from a spread that encompasses the no-place of Ogygia, ‘omphalos of the sea’ (Od. 1.50), and the halfway world of Scheria,Footnote 24 the plot is ‘purposefully funneled in a consistent spatial direction’, its ‘aperture’ closed,Footnote 25 until all the lines – the destiny of the house of Odysseus, the Return of the Hero – converge on a single focal point: the κίων (Od. 23.191) that forms the omphalos of the oikos.Footnote 26 This is because, as discussed, ‘[h]ouse, household, property, mistress, kingship: the five objects of the suitors’ aspiration, five challenges to Odysseus’ hold on his identity, are all assimilated’ in the single space of the bed.Footnote 27 The bed is thus the decisive, climactic site of plot resolution, the great node where the major threads of the poem – What will become of the house of Odysseus? Will the hero successfully return? – are to be tied up and thus where, paradoxically, dénouements occur.
7.2.2 Penelope’s peira
But before he can attain this ultimate destination, the symbolic epicentre, and climactic site of plot resolution, Odysseus must pass a test (Od. 23.114, 181). A peira is precisely what we would expect at this point of the ‘quest’ pattern;Footnote 28 it is also precisely what we would expect in an Odyssean ‘recognition scene’ (although here the roles are reversed, and Odysseus the one tested).Footnote 29 This particular peira is notable for two reasons, however: unlike the peira of the Cyclops, Eumaeus, or the stringing of the bow, this is a test of knowledge, not of respect for xenia, or loyalty, or brawn.Footnote 30 What is more, following the shift in narrative structure, begun with the departure from Circe’s island, which brought about the ‘coalescence of a quest and a return pattern’ in such a way that ‘consecutive quests are interlocking’ rather than merely consecutive, ‘the return [nostos] is part and ultimate object of the quest’;Footnote 31 this means that just as the bed therefore becomes the ultimate destination of the hodos, the interview with Penelope becomes the ultimate peira (see Figure 7.1). The scene thus recapitulates in miniature the dynamics of the larger nostos-as-quest: a journey that culminates in a peira, which, when passed, grants access to the absolutely fixed, stable point at the secluded core of the oikos.
Figure 7.1 Confluence of story pattern, theme, type-scene: Interview with Penelope
About the second point we have said much already: the bed, as a tree root, is literally em-pedon – etymology and image, sign and referent converge at the root, the archetypally fixed, hidden, unchanging sēma which is both what stands at the end of the journey and that to which one gains access by virtue of the peira. Although critics have excavated an exceptional range of meaning out of this test,Footnote 32 the degree to which the rooted bed functions as the hub of a knowledge-based oiko-nomy – where knowledge input is converted or exchanged into knowledge output – has been little discussed.Footnote 33
The test is a test of knowledge firstly insofar as a special kind of knowledge is the precondition to its operations; as Odysseus is careful to point out, the craftsmanship required to make such an empedon sēma requires one who works εὖ … ἐπισταμένως (Od. 23.197).Footnote 34 In addition to this knowledge-how that acts as a condition of possibility for the test, what the peira tests for is knowledge-that (viz. knowledge that a certain object has a certain quality): ‘If he knows the bed, he is (her) Odysseus.’Footnote 35 But, thirdly, even more than this: if he knows the bed, she knows that he is (her) Odysseus. With the introduction of his knowledge, the bed in turn generates, bears, produces knowledge for her – knowledge, what is more, of an especially certain, absolute, fixed kind (see Figure 7.2).
Figure 7.2 Nostos-as-quest (à la Bakker): Final episode (interview with Penelope)
7.2.3 The Fixity of the Sign Signs Fixity (Fixedly)
It is well known that Odysseus first refers to the bed itself as a sēma (Od. 23.188) and then characterizes his knowledge of the bed’s manufacture as a sēma that he ‘makes manifest’ (Od. 23.202) to Penelope. In this second use, Odysseus echoes Penelope’s rebuke to Telemachus that she and Odysseus share ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’ (κεκρυμμένα) sēmata (Od. 23.110; used again by Penelope to confirm his passage of the peira at Od. 23.225: σήματ᾽ ἀριφραδέα κατέλεξας). Likewise, we have seen that Odysseus refers to the bed’s physically ‘in-rooted’ quality with the word empedon (Od. 23.203). This semantic dance attains its climax immediately thereafter in the narrator’s virtually untranslatable description of Penelope’s acceptance that the beggar is Odysseus (Od. 23.206):
Through this dazzling jeu de mot, ‘the sēma that is empedon (i.e. the bed rooted in the earth) emerges as a sēma empedon (i.e. a valid sign)’.Footnote 36 A valid sign of ‘Odysseus’ identity and Penelope’s fidelity’ that works as a sign precisely because it ‘entwine[s]’ these two components ‘like the infinite turnings of a Möbius strip’.Footnote 37
The relationship between the sēma that is empedon that emerges as an empedon sēma obtains at an even deeper level, however, and the two are more tightly entwined than simply by a metonymy wrought in the text by the artful narrator. Once we acknowledge (as too few critics seem to have done) the degree to which the sēma really and truly is empedon (i.e. the sign is valid as a proof), we have what the Aristotelian typology would classify as a recognition ek syllogismou (Poet. 14.1455a4–13).Footnote 38 (Were one so inclined, one could even formalize it into a logically valid deductive argument – a strange exercise, but one that is illustrative simply because it is possible.) The conclusion of the knowledge provided by the peira and the empedon sēma (valid proof) is indeed empedon: fixed, certain, stable, ‘inconvertible’.Footnote 39 And not because a god revealed it, or a prophet foretold it;Footnote 40 the security of Penelope’s conclusion is fixed by nothing more nor less than the series of deductive inferences that the strict conditions of her peira make possible (see Figure 7.3).
Figure 7.3 Nostos-as-quest (à la Bakker) + Recognition: Interview with Penelope
Also useful, however, is what such an exercise reveals about the basic structure of the test. The peira hinges on the rigorous and absolute seclusion of the bed: only its secure enclosure allows the disclosure of its secret to bring true, lasting, stable ultimate closure.Footnote 41 This in turn, however, requires that the bed be absolutely and permanently secluded, which in turn can only be guaranteed if the bed is impossible to remove from its place of secrecy. It is therefore the very quality of the bed – its fixity – that constitutes the secret in question which makes this secret possible in the first place, and that makes knowledge of its secret an empedon sēma. Had the great sēma of their marriage lay in a mark inscribed upon a free-standing bed – or a bow in a storeroom, or, say, a ring – something mobile that, in one form or another, could be exposed or put into free circulation, how could one police the secrecy of the secret, how ensure that the sēma had not been covertly smuggled out, where anyone might come to see it and know it? It is only because the very nature of the sēma (bed) – that it is empedon – intrinsically precludes its being put into open circulation that it can remain empedon as a sēma (proof), can properly ground the proof (sēma), and the certain knowledge it provides. Returning to the question of the semantic play between (that which is a) sēma and (that which is) empedon, it is not only that the words empedon and sēma are transferred metonymically from the bed to the proof (that results from the peira which grants access to the bed). Logically, the test is only as valid as the bed-tree is fixed; the sēma is empedon (a valid proof) because the sēma is empedon (the bed is fixed).Footnote 42
Except, of course, there is no word for ‘deduction’ at this point (and as Lloyd reminds us, there will be none in Parmenides) – nor for ‘logic’, nor ‘inference’, nor ‘proof’ – nor is there any conceptual apparatus within which they would make sense.Footnote 43 That of course, does not (and perhaps cannot) happen until after Parmenides establishes the practice the concept would name. In the absence of any technical vocabulary or conceptual apparatus, then, how does one figure the notion of certainty derived from rigorous in-ference? How imag(in)e it? In the articulation of what it means for a sēma (as proof) to be valid, what we see is a complex and powerful semantic trans-fer of meaning, one whose journey trans-scends (from) the physical to the conceptual, the sensible to the intelligible, the concrete to the abstract, the etymologically primary to the derivative.Footnote 44 The first use of the word empedon at line 23.203 to describe the bed brings us (at just the moment it allows Odysseus himself) back to the (etymological) root (,/ of the) ‘in-grounded’. The signified of the signifier sēma having thus been sufficiently established in this uniqueFootnote 45 – and uniquely fixed – signified, it is then immediately put into circulation in the text. We have seen that this circulation operates metonymically: the proof is fixed and certain next to (in language of the text) and before (in the plot) the in-grounded tree root. We have also seen that this transfer of signifieds is grounded or authorized by the logical relationship between the empedon sēma (fixed object), which stands as a premise in the empedon sēma (fixed proof): the proof is fixed and certain because the in-grounded tree root is. What it means, though, for the conclusion produced by this inference – an abstract, conceptual, intelligible notion (one that, through its position in the plot happens to be an in-ference, in physical, concrete, sensible terms: a ‘bearing-into’ a fixed, terminal, stable [place of] conclusion) – can only be expressed in language and imagery anchored to, rooted in, grounded by the arresting concrete, physical, sensible image of the in-grounded root: the proof is (as) fixed and certain as or like the in-grounded tree root is. What it means for a conclusion to be absolutely certain, then, for a proof-by-inference to be absolutely secure and trustworthy requires this figuration: this semantic transfer draws its power from the strength of the (image of the) in-grounded root.
There is, finally, one last figuration derived from this root. The sēma that cannot be put into circulation (and thus works like a signature), that is untransferable, whose absolute se-clusion and fixity are the condition of possibility for the peira and the absolute fixity of the conclusion it produces, has not quite finished stabilizing, establishing, certifying. For the absolutely certain conclusion is itself about the absolute stability and fixedness of identity, about the invariable reality beneath the shimmering, poikilia world of appearances (where a beggar can be a king and a stranger one’s husband). This underlying reality (as secluded and closely guarded as the impenetrable bedroom, one which can only be accessed by a test of knowledge, a certain proof) is as fixed, stable, certain, immobile, invariant as the proof that guarantees it and gives access to it, as fixed, stable, certain, immobile, invariant as/because the tree root is in-grounded. If he knows the (fixed, certain, unmoving) bed, she knows (certainly, fixedly, unerringly, unchangingly) he is her (fixed, unmovingly, unchangingly same) Odysseus. Bed, proof, underlying reality: all empedon, all (as) in-grounded (as/because the tree root is).
7.2.4 ‘And on This hodos There Are Many sēmata … That (What-Is Is/Are) Indivisible, Immobile, Perfectly Completed …’
Where does all this leave us vis-à-vis Parmenides? Briefly, four possibilities. First, what (of the Odyssean sēma) is em-bedded in Parmenides’ what-is? Or, to reverse the question, does his ‘what-is’ spring from this same (tree) root? The bed stands em-pedon (Od. 23.203); so, too, does to eon: being ἀκίνητον (Fr. 8.26), it χοὔτως ἔμπεδον αὖθι μένει (Fr. 8.30).Footnote 46 The bed is empedon, as we saw, because it is virtually impossible – even for a god (Od. 23.184–86) – to sever it, cut it, divide it (ὑποτέμνειν, as Odysseus puts it at Od. 23.204); so, too, is Parmenides’ being – οὐδὲ διαιρετόν as it is declared to be (Fr. 8.22). The bed is indivisible in turn because of the perfect way in which it has been formed, this great sign; as Odysseus notes, he cut the branches (Od. 23.195), trimmed the trunk ‘from the root up’ and planed it smooth ‘all around’ (ἀμφέξεσα, Od. 23.196) with a bronze adze ‘well and cunningly, truing it to the line … I bored it with the augur … beginning with this, I made smooth the timbers of my bed, until I completed it’ (ὄφρ’ ἐτέλεσσα, Od. 23.199; 23.196–99 for the passage). But not before first encasing the tree in the cocoon of a protective, hidden seclusion, an outermost bound that establishes an inviolate inner space (Od. 23.192–93):
So, too, Parmenides’ being is τετελεσμένον (Fr. 8.42), τελεστόν (Fr. 8.4), and presses out on all sides, inviolate, like a sphere.Footnote 47 Is this all just coincidence?
Second, in Parmenides’ hodos dizēsios there is the fusion, reconstitution, or recombination of the three dynamics discussed above: (i) a quest that, through a test, leads to liquidation of the lack; (ii) a recognition that, through a test, reveals a true, underlying identity beneath a potentially deceptive or uncertain world of appearances; and (iii) a nostos that leads to a final destination. As we have seen, the fractal logic of oral composition integrates this final episode into the nostos in such a way that the last quest simultaneously replicates the whole nostos even as it completes it, both a ‘nostos-as-quest’ and a ‘quest-for-nostos’ (as Tiresias puts it in his address to Odysseus [νόστον δίζηαι, Od. 11.100]; in Odysseus’ words: νόστον … διζήμενος Od. 23.253): in this case, that is, the liquidation of the lack is itself equivalent to arrival at the final destination. The endpoint in this nostos is distinctively fixed. This test is distinctive insofar as it is a test of knowledge and, vitally, a test that, via a series of deductive reasoning, produces knowledge of an unusually certain, definitive, and absolute kind. And, finally, as a test that leads to recognition, this certain, definitive knowledge is knowledge of the true, certain, stable underlying reality, the reality here of identity, that is obscured by the deceptive surface appearances of the outside world (a king who appears as a beggar, a husband who appears as a stranger). It is precisely this syntagm of nostos-as-quest-leading-to-a-fixed-stable-endpoint-through-a-deductive-test-which-reveals-the-fixed-underlying-reality that we find in Odyssey 23.
Odysseus’ ‘quest pattern’ first becomes a true nostos at the point where he departs Circe’s island, with her instructions – none other than the passage spanning Odyssey 12.39–141 – to return home.Footnote 48 Between the instructions of the divinity and the fixed conclusion of the empedon sēma of the bed (which reveals the fixed reality underlying the world of appearances) lies the hodos; but one attains the empedon sēma at the other end only after a rigorously deductive test yields an empedon sēma. In this we see the précis of the basic architecture of Parmenides’ hodos dizēsios – and the third element of Parmenides’ ‘demonstration’ (iii). We noted above that scholars of Parmenides were divided about the meaning of sēmata at Fr. 8.2: some rendered it as ‘signposts’, others ‘proofs’. Mourelatos’s discussion about the meaning of epi is convincing,Footnote 49 but the dazzling linguistic pas-de-deux performed during the course of the bed-test in Odyssey 23 should allow us to see how both meanings can exert their force in a way which is not only not mutually exclusive, but is indeed profoundly mutually reinforcing.
7.3 An End That Is No End
Except, of course, this is not the end. Neither of the Odyssey – which goes on to tell of the suitors’ descent to Hades, Odysseus’ reunion with Laertes, and the aftermath of the mnēstērophonia – nor of Odysseus’ hodos, for, as Tiresias had told him and as he tells Penelope, ‘still after this there will be a measureless toil, long and difficult, which I must fulfil to the end’ (τὸν ἐμὲ χρὴ πάντα τελέσσαι, Od. 23.249–50). In fact, this isn’t even the final sēma: as Tiresias had told him, when his journey carries on so far that, once again, his observer’s categories fail to match the categories of the local actors, this itself will be a σῆμα ἀριφραδές (Od. 23.273) for him to perform the proper rituals to appease Poseidon.Footnote 50 (Even within the plot of the Odyssey’s twenty-four books, the bed is not even the final empedon sēma, the last tree root: cf. Od. 24.346.)Footnote 51 And so, once the stories are told, the two halves of the Odyssey recounted by Odysseus to Penelope and vice versa, Athena hits ‘time-in’, Dawn is back over the Ocean ‘straightaway’ (Od. 23.347), and Odysseus is all business, scheming to recoup his losses, his depleted flocks, preserve his possessions (Od. 23.355–56). There are angry kinsman with debts to settle, questions of paternity and patrimony to square: the world’s complexities are too great to be so swiftly, so neatly resolved.Footnote 52
Nor, of course, does Parmenides’ poem end with the ‘Route to Truth’. What else could one do after spelling out the perfect completion of the perfectly completed sphere that what-is is (like)?Footnote 53 What else is there to say, except, perhaps (Fr. 8.50–51):
and move on to a deceptive kosmos of words (Fr. 8.52). The question of the relationship between the ‘Route to Truth’ and Doxa is perhaps the most notorious of all Parmenidean cruces (no mean feat).Footnote 54 But it would seem, at any rate, that Parmenides’ world, too, is too complex to be fully captured, encompassed in the single spare route whose itinerary forms Fr. 8.3–49: ‘almost as soon as they were conceived … these truly portentous ideas of Parmenides suffered a kind of breakdown, leading to what I call a Parmenidean apology, and this this breakdown was portentous too’.Footnote 55
7.4 Another K/Crisis, More Con(-)sequences?
And where does this leave us here, on this book’s hodos dizēsios, especially now that it is addressing the – and attempting to find a – conclusion (iii)? Claiming as it does to make a significant and original contribution to scholarship, it, too, is heir to Parmenides’ hodos; is it also heir to Odysseus’ hodos, to the peira of knowledge, to the sēma that is empedon?Footnote 56 To put the question another way: What is the status of the parallel between the two hodoi that should end but does not seem able to? Or, to get to the heart of the matter: What is the nature of the relationship between the root of what-is and the root-bed?
These questions are provocative for the following reason: it is not clear that it allows for the kind of definitive answer a true journey along Parmenides’ hodos would seem to yield; certainly it is less conclusive, less absolute, than the fixity of the knowledge yielded by Penelope’s peira, the unchanging fixity of the identity, the layer of underlying reality revealed by the test, or the utterly fixed, stable, unchanging endpoint. This is pertinent for two reasons: in the first place, because there is no equivalent of Penelope’s peira that we could hope to supply in this setting; all we can do is note the linguistic resonances, the structural similarities in terms of language, structure, form, plot, dramatic scenario, dramatis personae. But there is no proof. This is no demonstration.
On the other hand, however, this failure to constitute a proper peira, the absence of a properly empedon sēma (fixed proof) yielding a proper empedon sēma (certain conclusion), shows us simply how close the patterns of Odyssey 12 and Odyssey 23 are to fragments 2, 6, 7, and 8 (see Figure 7.4 above). In both poems, travel down the proper hodos leads to (or indeed is) a rigorous proof that affords access to the fixed, certain end and insight into the true, invariant, permanent reality beneath appearances. Paradoxically, by failing to meet the rigorous threshold of the Parmenidean test in support of the claim that this evolves out of the Odyssean model, we manage more than anything else to deepen and draw into stark relief the breadth and specificity of the parallel.
Figure 7.4 Parmenides’ ‘Route to Truth’
There is a fork, then: to reject or to accept the parallels, and if to accept, to accept to a greater or lesser extent. A familiar pattern. But with a twist: to be unpersuaded by the parallel between Odyssey 12 and 23 and the ‘Route to Truth’ is, paradoxically, to confirm nothing else but the strength of the parallel. Our own hodos dizēsios must lead to a more tetelesmenon telos, our sēmata must be more empeda to claim the atremēs heart of truth. But we are hardly better off if the parallel persuades us – in that case, would we not have to accept the rest of the parallel, the one that runs from apologoi to epilogue and beyond to apology. Should we not accept, in other words, that there is more, that this end is not an end either? To answer ‘yes’ – to suggest that the reading adumbrated in the last two sections of this chapter, patchy, impressionistic, hardly rigorous as it is, adheres to an acceptable hodos – has an implication for the conclusion, the status of the point at which a good book ought to arrive (otherwise what was the point?): the conclusion is a true accomplishment, a sēma sufficiently empedon. But in that case, it also has an implication for ‘the conclusion’ (iii) as such: how could we ever end here? What telos could ever be tetelesmenon, what sēma empedon enough to meet the Parmenidean standards, standards that would be residues of an inheritance from Homer? Standards that neither Homer nor Parmenides could themselves adequately meet, it seems, from the very beginning? What, then, about Pindar? And what about Heraclitus, after all? Orphic texts and rituals? The Pythagoreans? Is it even possible to answer these questions: in practice, given how little we know about the interaction between Parmenides and the first two, how little remains of the second two, or in theory, given the impossibility of demonstrating – conclusively, incontrovertibly, inescapably, in a properly empedon way – the relationship between one poem and another, one image and another, one word and another?
At stake in all this is our conception of ‘method’: its past and (the) present hodos dizēsios, both muthoi hodoio: the tale of the transition from hodos to ‘method’, the tale we tell ourselves about the epistemology of travelling a (met)hodos. That, however, is a muthos hodoio not properly told until Sophocles and the Oedipus Tyrannus.
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