Dear Philosophy Friends,

I've recently began a research on Kundera's mention of Parmenides in his "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and I can't seem to find a text or source for his attribution of what I called the "Positive-Negative Dichothomy" to Parmenides. Please note the following excerpt from the early pages:

Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness? — Milan Kundera, in 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'

Here, Kundera clearly attributes the "Positive-Negative Dichotomy" (and, I assume, its inherent metaphysical dilemmas) to Parmenides, however, I've researched through Parmenides' Poem to some extent (the John Burnett translation) and Plato's dialogue and can't seem to find a source for this assumption. I've even considered that it could have been insinuated in one of Zeno's paradoxes, but that path proved fruitless as well. The issue gains further relevance given that this is one of the main foundations of Kundera's entire thesis in the book.

I've dipped my toe into the Unity of Opposites and, even though my findings show that the notion was prevalent in pre-Socreatic philosophy, I registered no mention of Parmenides in relation to this. The only link I found was, in fact, through Nietzsche, where he states, on Parmenides:

Thus [Parmenides] differentiated between positive and negative qualities, seriously attempting to find and note this basic contradictory principle throughout all nature. His method was as follows: he took several contradictories, light and heavy for example, rare and dense, active and passive, and held them against his original model contradictories light and dark. Whatever corresponded to light was the positive quality, whatever corresponded to dark, the negative. Taking heavy and light, for example, light [in the sense of 'weightless'] was apportioned to light, heavy to dark, and thus heavy seemed to him but the negation of weightless, but weightlessness seemed a positive quality. The very method exhibits a defiant talent for abstract-logical procedure, closed against all influences of sensation. For heaviness surely seems to urge itself upon the senses as a positive quality; yet this did not prevent Parmenides from labelling it as a negation. Likewise he designated earth as against fire, cold as against warm, dense as against rare, feminine as against masculine, and passive as against active, to be negatives. Thus before his gaze our empirical world divided into two separate spheres, the one characterized by light, fieriness, warmth, weightlessness, rarification, activity and masculinity, and the other by the opposite, negative qualities. — Friedrich Nietzsche, in 'Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks'

Nevertheless, the dilemma still stands: I cannot find the source for either Kundera or Nietzsche's attribution of the "Positive-Negative Dichotomy" to Parmenidean school of thought.

Hence, I wonder if you could help me in this regard. Was there, at any point in Parmenides' known work, a reference to a world seen through the lens of a "Positive-Negative Dichotomy"? Or was this quite simply a case of misattribution by Kundera via Nietzsche? The latter seems unlikely, given his other arguments for his thesis where he accurately cites Nietzsche's postulate of Eternal Recurrence.

Thank you for reading thus far, and I hope you find my quest as challenging and motivating as I do. Eagerly awaiting your reply.

A friend from afar,

Adam