(13) Blogging Through Prof Martin Heidegger’s Interpretations of Greek Philosophy (Parmenides Part 4)

  • Why are you so petrified of silence? Here can you handle this?  Did you think about your bills, you ex, your deadlines?  Or when you think you’re going to die? Or did you long for the next distraction?

All I Really Want

(by Alanis Morissette)

  • This is in fact the case: for the polis, still thought in a Greek way, is the pole and the site around which all appearing of essential beings, and with it also the dreadful non-essence of all beings, turns

(Heidegger, Heraclitus Lecture Course, 1943-44, pg 11)

I spoke previously about the polis and the fleeting nature of what is prized in it, the current, so I’ll leave the above two quotes as they stand.

In ancient Greek poetry, the concept of the afterlife was often depicted through the idea of the underworld, or Hades. The shades, or psūkhaí (ψυχαί), which were the spirits or souls of the deceased, indeed wandered in this realm. When Odysseus visits the underworld in Book 11, he encounters numerous shades of the dead. These spirits are not at rest; they flutter around aimlessly until they drink the life force blood Odysseus offers, which temporarily allows them to communicate. This suggests a kind of wandering or lack of peace.  Blood was seen as the essence of life. In ancient Greek culture, blood was often equated with the soul or psyche. The shades (ghosts) in the underworld were described as insubstantial and without true life; they required blood to gain temporary vitality and awareness, allowing them to speak and interact with the living.  The restless wandering shade was what was leftover when everything else was stripped from the person.  Let’s consider this with Parmenides.

I’ve been noting previously the Greek thought of the restless, erratic flux of the soul that is brought into repose with philosophy.  Plato discusses the idea of striving for constancy or permanence, likening it to the stars, in his work “Timaeus.” Specifically, in this dialogue, Plato describes the heavenly bodies as models of constancy and perfection, contrasting them with the impermanent and changing nature of earthly things. Plato discusses the idea of humans aspiring towards the eternal, in this case, the eternal nature of the universe or the Forms, is in Timaeus 47b-c. Here, Plato talks about how the cosmos was created to be an image of eternity, and humans should aim to understand and align with this eternal nature:

“And so he (God) made an eternal image of eternity, moving according to number, which we call ‘time’. For there were no days and nights and months and years before the heaven came into being, but when he contrived the motion of the Same and the Other, and of these two, that part which is divided according to number, and calls into being the various cognitions of Time—such as were past, present, and future—then he devised the sun and moon and five other stars, which are called planets, for the determining and preserving of the numbers of Time.”

And further, in 90b-d, Plato discusses the purpose of human life in relation to the divine:

“But if anyone pursues after those studies which have to do with the divine part of himself, he shall attain to the life of the gods, and, so far as is possible for human nature, will himself become immortal.”

Here, Plato suggests that by focusing on philosophical contemplation and understanding the eternal and unchanging truths (the Forms), humans can live in a way that aligns with the eternal, striving for a sort of immortality of the soul. The concept of aligning with or aspiring to the eternal is clear.

The implication is that humans should aspire to the eternal and unchanging qualities of the celestial bodies, which are seen as reflections of the eternal Forms or Ideas. This theme of aspiring to the permanent and unchanging is central to Platonic philosophy.  Philosophical life for the Greeks, if it is maintained over the whole of one’s life by being understood as the proper one, is a kind of godliness/deathlessness, athanatizein, since the comportment that relates to and hence apprehends/is attuned to (the way in which the philosopher is-there with) the eternal, the unchanging, must itself be unchanging, must not stray but tarry with the unchanging, and  hence in a sense is deathless (without cessation), since what is unchanging admits of no passing away, “therein resides the peculiar tendency of the accommodation of the ‘temporality’ of human life to the eternity of the world … This is the extreme position to which the Greeks carried human life (Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 122).”

For Heidegger’s reading of Parmenides, he is considering Being is related to apprehension, and how Being relates to the present (Heidegger, 128).  Heidegger notes (pg 124) Thales (Theatetus, 174a) fell into a well while gazing at the stars.  Philosophical life is a disposition.  We say Thales was “lost in the moment” where “time flies (isn’t perceived).” From Pindar we see Being is golden, invisible luster, but this is thought out of a more essential restlessness, a figurative being-addicted to the luster of beings.  This moment or present is also what Husserl called the living present, and so the past is always a past present and the future is always a future present, we never leave the present.  If I presentify my trip last year to the Eiffel tower I bring it into my present here and now.  The present is also current and as such is the fleeting place of fame, gossip and news.  Unlike Plato’s forms Being is not timeless so there is nothing about Being that signifies eternity.  Heidegger’s student Gadamer noted: “Heidegger made the ingenious observation that ‘always,’ aei, had nothing to do with aetemitas [eternity], but must be thought along the lines of [what is at the time], of that which is present. This can be drawn from the usage of the language :
Ho aei Basileuon, [the king at the time, not the eternal king].”

Being has neither past nor future and is foreign to all change.  Being is present.  If it is a question whether the hammer is brown or broken, we resolve the issue by consulting the hammer here and now.  Appearing is also in the present.  If I am recollecting Joe Carter winning the World Series for the Toronto Blue Jays, I bring that memory before myself in the now .  More original than the now that marches steadily into the future (in two more days it will be Christmas), or from the inverse point of view flowing out of the future toward the present and passing away into the past (Christmas is coming – has arrived- went into the past), the present is that which marches on or receives.  The present refers to kato kosmon, not nature, but the unified beings as a whole.  For example, we say philosophers (e.g., Thales falling in a ditch) are not close to life/the world of becoming or semblance, the current everyday busyness, gossip, rumors, new, and daily and distractions, like an awkward kid at a party where beings are refusing him so he pretends to examine a plant.  With this breaking-down in the case of Thales, a point of method noted repeatedly in this blog series, Life/World is then not a random collection as nature, but a very definite context that beings are interconnected in and receive significance from: “Parmenides in general demonstrates for the first time that there is something like nonbeing, in the form of semblance (Heidegger, 139).”  People try to stamp the transitory with Being, but this is mere chatter.  The transitory has a luster or shine (Heidegger, 140) to it, like a lover who is leaving you behind on a long trip: absence makes the heart grow fonder: “All semblance gleams, shines, enthralls, and captivates precisely when the semblance unfolds into the enchanting manifold of to and fro, on and off, open and closed – this free play of ‘according to circumstances’ is prevalent everywhere: As thus constant and unified it [becoming] is something like Being (en) (Heidegger, 144).”  Recall our thoughts on Anaximander with Anne of Green Gables.  This example was close and we see how ideas also have luster, but they also have a clarity about them that is opposed to the frenzy of the circus of life: “Yet in the luster of metal there is still the intrinsically steady reflection of pure brightness and clarity (Heidegger, 145).” 

The thought still stands though, that parestios as being at home is thought in distinction to deinon, a being addicted to beings where the negative dreadful element holds sway over the narcotic like luster of beings.  Heidegger comments the goddess in Parmenides’s poem is sovereign over the

“dreadful (stugeros)… In arising to presence, there enters at the same time utter absence, both at once, presence and absence, dread and bliss, impotence and power, deinon, away and here, in frenzy – Dionysus… [A]ll the things that gleam and also become extinguished, faint, and dark in their nexus of appearance a nexus that presents itself at once as movement, whether that is clearly established, coordinated with others and with other appearances or errant as the movement of the moon or in general the appearance of semblance – all these things, without their own light  and without the correct appurtenance, wander about in the contourless dark of the night (Heidegger, 146-8)”   

Note the imagery of wandering, like a shade in Hades.  What pertains to every human is the sensuality (Heidegger, 149) that feeds off radiance.  Stripped of all its corporeality, the shade still has restlessness as its one connection to its former humanity:

“Where light and that which is light occur, there also that which is light and illuminated can be apprehended and likewise also warmth and brightness, sound and voice.  Where light and that which is light are absent, as in a dead body, there not nothing but, instead, the dark and dense, the closed, the mute.  Accordingly – the dead apprehend cold, the dead hear silence.  Even the dead, those who are no longer alive, apprehend… Therefore, in the manner of appearance, this (what was presented in the appearance of the world) originated, and now still remains, and afterwards, henceforth nourished, will come to its end (150).”