(10) Blogging Through Prof Martin Heidegger’s Interpretations of Greek Philosophy (Parmenides Part 1)

I’ve moved beyond Heidegger’s analysis of Anaximander in the lecture course to Parmenides.  Parmenides, of course, is the great philosopher of Being, so let’s gather some preliminary thoughts about Being.

When we normally talk about Being, we mean a few different things.  The first is whatness: the dog understood in terms of its furriness for example.  Moreover, we mean howness, such as the table is badly placed in the middle of the gym floor during the game.  In both cases “taken/understood” as furry and as badly positioned, logos apophantikos is intended – something as something, which is to say something as something else.  This can either be something secondary like position and texture, or essential like materiality and in-itself-ness of the piece of chalk.  However, something prior is required. 

In a few lecture courses Heidegger gives the example of what makes the understanding of the Being of beings possible even when it isn’t in subject predicate form.  For instance, if I hear a living thing at my feet only to look down and see I mis-took dead leaves rustling in the wind for a living thing, this shows the basic stance toward the world is “taking as.”  As we noted, when a process breaks down such as in mis-taking we can see its components conspicuously.  We said Being is the same as “as” in language, so we could say

(i) “I took/understood the failure as a learning experience” is like saying

(ii)  “I took/understood the failure to be a learning experience.” 

The preposition “as” is introducing the prepositional phrase and so “as” indicates the manner (how) or role in which something is considered or used. Here, it suggests that the failure is being reinterpreted or reframed as something positive or beneficial.  “As” introduces a phrase that describes how the action of “taking” is performed or understood, linking the direct object with its new interpretation.  So, if our basic stance toward the world is “taking as,” this is another way of saying we have an understanding of Being as a fundamental component of what it means to be human.

We move in a general understanding of Being, and when asked what a being such as a book is, we know what books are even if we struggle to say what a book univocally and definitively consists of.  We are acquainted in an average way with the whatness (essence) of beings without genuine knowledge.  There are historical entities, entities of nature, beings of all the various domains, but what are beings “as such?,” insofar as they are beings?  Beings are familiar, while their Being is unfamiliar. 

In normal language usage there is a fourfold understanding of Being that extends out to all beings in all domains.  Beings are actual, have thatness: the earth “is,” is something rather than nothing.  The earth is also a planet: whatness.  The earth is round: has such and such qualities: suchness.  The earth revolves around the sun: trueness. 

Being is expressed with the word “is” but is still present even if it is missing linguistically like when a child says “Door-Closed.”  People may be in disagreement out beings but all have agreement about Being.  We further usually delineate Being when we say it is not becoming (nature with its processes and developments; history and its events and formations; etc), nor “Ought” determinations (moral actions and such tasks), nor thinking (consciousness; lived experiences), nor semblance (those things opposed to truth).  It is usually thought of as the most universal and indeterminatene. But it is opaque because we usually start with one region of beings (nature), and so don’t raise the question of beings as beings.  It is the case that delimiting Being as I did above as not becoming, thought, ought, nor semblance won’t do because each of these, such as becoming, are not nothing, but “are” in some way or other.  Really, then, what really limits Being is nothingness.  But what is nothing?  This oscillating back and forth of the question of Being produces “unrest (Heidegger’s emphasis, 58),” which is perhaps a kind of nothing though as we said previously with the earliest Greeks restlessness/boredom was a feature of beings (the boring book), not an emotion that runs its course in our inner lives.

As Plato notes in the Gorgias, the Greeks grasped Being as presence, for example in the beautiful thing beauty is present.  Being (e.g., houseness) was what was present and stable in the world of alterations and complete, though a particular house only lets houseness appear in a limited aspect.   Beauty for Plato, like the gold of Pindar, was the vehicle through which beings appeared, and so incarnate in the mansion, merely present in the average house, and lacking in the dilapidated shack.  Homer said appearing did not happen for everyone in the same way, so the next person might think the mansion gaudy or the shack quaint.  Beings for the Greeks were fleeting and so they were restless, and the philosophers attuned themselves to the constancy of Being, like thinking about the idea of justice which did not come to be or pass way but simply is, and when something comes along to challenge our understanding of justice and we have to re-think it, we are not inventing something totally new but uncovering what justice is and always was though we previously didn’t see it as clearly as we now do.