The dominant contemporary paradigm in philosophical research abhors contradiction.

This prejudice is operative in many of the dominant anglophone interpretations of Presocratic

philosophy. Barnes, for instance, says of Heraclitus, “can anyone have seriously supposed that,

say, being wet and dry are one and the same thing?”1 Rather than assume that the text makes

sense and strive for a coherent interpretation, Barnes is happy to throw out wholesale one of the

fathers of Western philosophy simply because he cannot imagine how someone could take

wetness and dryness to the in some sense the same. My paper attempts to take a stand against

this by examining how contradiction is productive and fruitful for three Presocratic philosophers:

Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Zeno.

It is perhaps easiest to see how Heraclitus makes productive use of contradiction in his

thought. The Ephesian philosopher in fact totally embraces contradiction. As Nehamas puts it,

for Heraclitus instability itself is stable. Heraclitus claims that there is one Logos shaping the

conduct of the cosmos, namely, that everything is constantly changing and in the process of

becoming its opposite. The Heraclitean cosmos is composed of indissoluble pairs of opposites

which are simultaneously one unity and two opposed things. Each individual thing is one with its

opposite and Heraclitus does not shy away from this contradictory evidence. On the contrary, he

raises this contradiction to the status of law: that a myriad of opposites constitute a stable unity,

and that the unity of the cosmos precisely is the strife of opposite against opposite—this is

Heraclitus’ contradictory Logos.

It is more difficult to see how Parmenides finds contradiction productive, since we

usually understand him to be rejecting its very possibility. The way of truth is, after all, that only

what is is and that what is not cannot be. Being and non-being do not and cannot mix. Yet here

we see that for Parmenides, too, contradiction is at the heart of truth, albeit as an impossibility. If
1
Barnes, Jonathan. The Presocratic Philosophers. 1 edition. London: Routledge, 1983, p. 53.
we take up the mainline position that holds Parmenides to be critiquing Heraclitus, then it is clear

that Parmenides is only able to reach his conclusions not by simply dismissing contradiction, but

by thinking through it. He thinks through Heraclitus’ contradictory Logos and decides that

contradiction has no place in logic. And, furthermore, he thinks through the fact that the cosmos

appears contradictory to us and decides that this, too, must be an illusion. This twofold rejection

is not a dismissal on the part of Parmenides, but rather the most careful consideration of

contradiction.

Finally, Zeno. Parmenides’ pupil is perhaps the Presocratic who makes contradiction bear

the most fruit. He takes his teacher’s rejection of contradiction and proves it by contradiction.

That is, he uses contradiction to prove non-contradiction. Thus, if Being is divisible then its parts

must be simultaneously infinitely big and infinitely small. This contradiction cannot hold, and

therefore, in the first proof by contradiction, Zeno proves the impossibility of contradiction.