Abstract
The paper aims to show some structural parallels between the concept of motion as developed by Parmenides (5th c. BC) and the expression of the phenomena of motion in the story A Solitary Voyage to the Island Cythera by the Greek writer M. Karagatsis (1908–1960). The novelette of M. Karagatsis is interpreted as a parmenidean “motionless motion” reflexion. It is argued that M. Karagatsis’s story is structurally and essentially related to the Parmenidean poem On Nature, treating the consideration of motion as one of the impossible properties of being; and more obviously refers to certain poems by Constantine Cavafy (1863–1993), which also contain the idea of the meaninglessness of the difference between κίνησις and ἀκινησία. Thus, the concepts of κίνησις and ἀκινησία in the story by M. Karagatsis echo both the Parmenidean ideas and the Cavafy’s images of movement.
Highlights
ParmenidesThere are at least two classical approaches within the field of the history of philosophy to the interpretation of Parmenides’s ideas – the logical one (Bredlow 2011; Hintikka 1980; Lewis 2009; MacKenzie 1982) and the ontological one (Barnes 1979; Bredlow 2011a; Lebedev 2008; Losev 1993)
We deal here with the “Parmenides of the XX century” as long as Karagatsis realizes the absence of difference between the boredom of a provincial and metropolitan life, but he is too lazy to explain this absence in the mode of philosophical indifference
Karagatsis showed that there are no differences “in the environment”, everything is one and the same. This is the main reason which forces the people “in two minds” to hate a philosopher. That is why they chase him away: “Spyros threw an icy gaze at me, looked at his watch and said goodbye to me; who knows to what devils he sent me in his mind.” (Karagatsis 2003, 96)
Summary
There are at least two classical approaches within the field of the history of philosophy to the interpretation of Parmenides’s ideas – the logical one (Bredlow 2011; Hintikka 1980; Lewis 2009; MacKenzie 1982) and the ontological one (Barnes 1979; Bredlow 2011a; Lebedev 2008; Losev 1993). Parmenides not as the figures of speech or the parables, but as meanings per se, i.e. the axle should be read as an axle, the socket as a socket and the whirling wheels as whirling wheels Such readings may become heuristic and give more philosophical insights in their literal meanings than the respective metaphorical analogies with other images (Bibikhin 2009, 311–330). Perhaps this approach will offer a more effective way of understanding the philosophical content of the preamble which offers a new insight to the strictly philosophical part of a poem. It should be noted that all these movements are circular
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