I desire, therefore I am
Parmenides, a pre-Socratic who lived in Magna Graecia (Southern Italy), was the first to suggest a cause-and-effect relationship between being and will.
His only surviving text which is quoted by contemporary philosophers for the poet’s “paradoxical” views on the nature of existence is, on second thought, an ontology of desire.
Misconceptions—stating Parmenides denied the world, refuted change altogether, or intended to moralize about things that are but “need not be”—set aside once fragment 2, which holds discernment derives from attesting to evidence (Πειθοῦς), acquires another significance.
Translated (Burnet, 1892) as if Parmenides himself is advising the reader (“Come now, I will tell thee - and do thou hearken to my saying and carry it away…”) the fragment is seen through the perspective of rhetorically answering the question “What is It?”. To which, logically, the response takes on modality itself, while scholarly reviews (Palmer, 2025) have included dialectical and normative stances on existence along with being in flux.
The significance of fragment 2, in my view, depends on the translation of two words, σύ and κέλευθος, whose meaning has been connected by Iliadic verbiage repeated in Parmenides’ poem. I base this assumption on syntactic in addition to semantic resemblance as follows. Both lyrical settings juxtapose those objected to their own will with subjects of manipulation whereas give credit to being self-directed. Read in the same stanza (Il. 4.286) with κελεύω (direct), that Agamemnon shall not do to Ajax, σύ does not refer to “you”; rather, it means “the” in plural accusative case coming from the Achaean leader recognizing his troops’ will (χαλκοχιτώνων… ἀνώγετον). Instead, thence, of “thou hearken to my saying”, I propose rendering σὺ μῦθον ἀκούσας “the counsel hearkening” which preserves the accusative form modeled against the unaccomplished (οὐ ἀνυστόν).
Hence “direction”, implying destination reached on account of counsel, captures κέλευθος literally as opposed to metaphorically (“way”). Even more so for two reasons: first, ὁδοὶ are the ways spoken about in a literal sense, marking inquiry (διζήσιός), of which evidence procures as a result of guiding oneself; second, “way of conviction” neither corresponds to the guidance connoted with μύθος, nor confers an individual trajectory. Furthermore, composed (Il. 13.784) with κελεύω to yet again extoll the valor of those who are self-directed, ὅππῃ signifies literally “in whichever direction” (Cunliffe, 1924) making unlikely, from a syntactical and semantic perspective, the metaphorical translation of ὀπηδεῖ (“is its companion”) on the same line with κέλευθος. Seen as such, likely would appear Ἀληθείῃ γὰρ ὀπηδεῖ confers literal—specifically biological—rather than metaphorical sense: “the truth well directs”.
Twice brought up on the second verse of fragment 2, φράζω attests to delivering words through biological means which, in turn, hold true as long as evidence is accumulated by the searcher expressing themselves markedly, nevertheless whatever purported unknowingly leaves no mark at all (παναπευθέα). In parallel to “the only two ways of search that can be thought of” Parmenides, I assume, speaks of the two ends of the trachea—which, on one end, brings oxygen to the lungs thus evidencing life in the body and, on the other end, delivers sound.
By reading the lines of “On Nature” metaphorically scholars have missed how, physiologically speaking, desire defines human nature.