Abstract:

One of the exciting challenges in Heidegger studies is engaging him as a Historian of Philosophy, not only piecing together what Heidegger said about the tradition, but then attempting to show Heidegger’s interpretation to be compelling by examining the thinker he engages with.  In this essay, I will be looking at Plato’s use of the term presence (Parousia) in the Phaedo through Heidegger’s lens on ancient thought.  My goal is not just uncovering an intellectual curiosity about Heidegger, but a profound truth of the human condition.

The term presence or Parousia is usually employed in a New Testament context to describe the second coming of Jesus, but the older Greeks employ it in a personification/figurative incarnational sense.  In his reading of Aristotle’s Physics (Heidegger, 1998b), Heidegger points to the idea of the great work of art as being “Art” incarnate, the universal appearing through the particular, “now that’s Art!” just as the circling bird of prey “is” Nature in an exemplary sense.  This is “morphe,” form, in the sense we say “good form” for an exemplary Olympic silver medal winning dive, or brilliant move in chess.  But, Homer says the gods don’t appear to everyone enargeis, in their fullness, giving the example of a goddess fully appearing radiantly to Odysseus, but lacking such radiance for Odysseus’ companion.  Presence thus refers to “appearing.”  Niagara Falls may appear “as” a wonder of the world to the tourist, but “as” noise pollution to the local resident.  There is thus a spectrum of appearing.  Houseness may be preeminently appearing in the beautiful mansion, merely present in the average house, and deficient in the dilapidated shack.  Just the same, the mansion may appear as gaudy to the next person, and the shack quaint.   Protagoras thus says man is the measure of all things, e.g., how a right angle triangle appears to a child who has not yet learned her shapes vs how it appears to a geometry professor working with the Pythagorean theorem. 

Language is an exemplary case of this kind of appearing.  We can imagine two adults and a child watching a romantic couple speaking in German on TV.  The one adult speaks no German, so the conversation is heard but does not appear to him.  The child is a native German speaker so understands the couple’s words but does not have the context to understand the romantic sense.  The other adult is a native German speaker and so listens to the couple with a romantic tear in her eye as Love truly appears to her: Now that’s Love!.    Sport is another example.  You can have 3 friends in a bar watching a playoff baseball game.  One friend doesn’t know the rules of baseball so they see the game but it doesn’t truly appear to them.  The second friend knows baseball but doesn’t care about the teams playing so the game is merely present.  The third friend is a die-hard fan of one of the teams and so excitedly scrutinizes and feels every pitch: Now that is baseball!

To Being belongs a tendency toward concealing, as the above example of language shows.  Heidegger’s interpretation of phenomenology: “Aletheia (un-hidden)” with the alpha privative = disclosing from hiddenness.  Heraclitus says physis kryptesthai philei, Being tends toward concealment.  We see this and the role of the person in encountering someone with some elderly people who no longer recognize their children “as” their children, the older man sees his children but they no longer appear to him as who they are.  Similarly, there is a neurological condition known as apperceptive prosopagnosia, a subtype of prosopagnosia (commonly called face blindness), in which individuals can perceive individual facial features—such as eyes, ears, mouth, and nose—but struggle to integrate them into a coherent whole face perception / not reflecting the Category of Unity.  This differs from associative prosopagnosia, where people can form a whole face percept but cannot link it to recognition or identity.  The impairment in apperceptive prosopagnosia stems from difficulties in early visual processing stages, often due to brain damage or developmental issues, rather than a problem with basic vision itself.

The human being dis-closes from hiddenness.  “In order to understand, Heidegger says, one must see phenomenologically. He thus invites us to the first exercise of phenomenological “kindergarten.” To tear apart [zer-reissen] means: to tear into two parts, to separate: to make two out of one. If a sock is torn, then the sock is no longer present-at-hand—but note: precisely not as a sock. In fact, when I have it on my foot, I see the “intact” sock precisely not as a sock. On the contrary, if it is torn, then THE sock appears with more force through the “sock torn into pieces.” In other words, what is lacking in the torn sock is the UNITY of the sock. However, this lack is paradoxically the most positive, for this Unity in being-torn is present [gegenwärtig] as a lost unity.” (Heidegger, Martin. Four Seminars p. 11).  “Twice the audience laughed over the “torn sock” saying. At first Heidegger answered pedantically, “I do not know why you are laughing. You must learn to endure the scope of a sentence such as the one I have cited.” (Heidegger, Martin. Four Seminars  p. 100).  Metaphysics in Philosophy doesn’t mean “more basic physics” in the sense that more basic than tables and chairs and trees is the quantum level of explanation/reality.  Rather  “ta meta ta physica” means disclosing the hidden context which makes possible the way things appear as objects of experience.

Hegel: The tearing of the sock phenomenalizes the Category of Unity, as a lost-Unity. Hegel, in his inaugural address, Heidelberg, 1816, says “The Being of the universe, at first hidden and concealed, has no power which can offer resistance to the search for knowledge; it has to lay itself open before the seeker — to set before his eyes and give for his enjoyment, its riches and its depths.” 

Heidegger: “Both scientific and prescientific comportments are a knowing in the sense of uncovering what is previously concealed, of revealing what was previously covered up, of disclosing what so far was closed off.”

Being is physis, growth, appearing, movement.  Calasso comments:

But how does a god make himself manifest? In the Greek language the word theos, “god,” has no vocative case, observed the illustrious linguist Jakob Wackernagel. Theos has a predicative function: it designates something that happens. There is a wonderful example of this in Euripides’ Helen: “O theoi. theos gar kai to gigno’ skein philous”–“O gods: recognizing the beloved is god.” Kerenyi thought that the distinguishing quality of the Greek world was this habit of “saying of an event: ‘It is theos.'” And an event referred to as being the?s could easily become Zeus, the most vast and all-inclusive of gods, the god who is the background noise of the divine. So when Aratus set out to describe the phenomena of the cosmos, he began his poem thus: “From Zeus let our beginning be, from he whom men never leave unnamed. Full of Zeus are the paths and the places where men meet, full of Zeus the sea and the seaports. Every one of us and in every way has need of Zeus. Indeed we are his offspring.”  “Iovis omnia plena,” Virgil would later write, and in these words we hear his assurance that this was a presence to be found everywhere in the world, in the multiplicity of its events, in the intertwining of its forms. And we also hear a great familiarity, almost a recklessness, in the way the divine is mentioned, as though to encounter divinity was hardly unusual, but rather something that could be expected, or provoked. The word atheos, on the other hand, was only rarely used to refer to those who didn’t believe in the gods. More often it meant to be abandoned by the gods, meant that they had chosen to withdraw from all commerce with men. Aratus was writing in the third century b.c., but what became of this experience that for him was so obvious and all-pervasive in the centuries that followed? How did time affect it? Did it dissolve it, destroy it, alter and empty it beyond recognition? Or is it something that still reaches out to us, whole and unscathed? And if so, where, how? (Calasso, 2002, 6)

We can think with Holderlin the blueing of the sky after the storm, which is always blueing inconspicuously but it becomes conspicuous in contrast with the grey storm sky.  Similarly, if we turn down a street new to us looking for the yellow house, the yellowness jumps out at us when we see it, the yellowing of the house normally being inconspicuous.

The “as” structure reflects the way we are in the world, and can be phenomenalized when the structure breaks down.  Heidegger gives one example of hearing a living thing in a forest at your feet only to look down to see you “mis-took” rustling dead leaves in the wind “as” a living thing.  He gives another example of a fort that was reported as captured during the war and in fact the soldiers looked at it and saw a friendly flag flying.  It was disastrous because they approached to fort “as though” it was friendly, only to find out the report was in error and had served as a hupokeimenon for them mis-perceiving the flag “as” friendly.  Mis-taking shows our normal disposition is taking-as. 

In Anaximander’s language the general state of thing is beings are either subtly or conspicuously out of joint (adikia), when something special happens like getting recognition at work or making a new friend, and beings as a whole temporarily fall into place/joint/jointure, and so, to use the language of Robert Browning and Lucy Maude Montgomery, for a short time it’s like “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.”  In this way we can see the unity of beings in out of jointness, and then again in jointure, the jointure reflecting “Pindar’s: Isthmians V. At the beginning of this ode the poet calls gold periosion panton, that which above all shines through everything, panta, shines through each thing present all around. The splendor of gold keeps and holds everything present in the unconcealedness of its appearing (Heidegger, 1971, 201).”  When it feels like God’s in his heaven and all is right with the world, there is a warmth to beings, the hearth, and we are parestios, the one in the sphere of the warmth of the hearth fire. 

The unity of beings is that which press upon me, out of joint or in jointure.  Under Homer’s understanding with beings as eonta, Homer applies the term eonta to “the Achaean’s encampment before Troy, the god’s wrath, the plague’s fury, funeral pyres, [and] the perplexity of the leaders’. Man too belongs to eonta.”  Something did not need to be an object to be a being, since a dream “is” just as much as a rock, is something rather than nothing. 

What was the average Greek understanding of the Being of beings?  For one thing Being means presence and being present, and so in Plato’s Gorgias we read of the average everyday understanding of Being as presence where Socrates says: “as you call beautiful those in whom beauty is present?  Callicles: “I do.” Plato Gorgias: (497e).  In Plato’s Phaedo, the term “parousia” is used in the context of Socrates’ discussion on causation and the theory of Forms, particularly around sections 100d–e. Here, it refers to the “presence” of a Form (such as Beauty itself) in particular objects, which is one way to explain why those objects partake in or exhibit the quality of that Form. For example, Socrates posits that a thing is beautiful not due to superficial attributes like color or shape, but because of the presence (parousia) or participation in the Form of Beauty. This “presence” is presented as a straightforward hypothesis for causation compared to other explanations, emphasizing how sensible things derive their properties from immaterial, eternal Forms.  This usage aligns closely with the etymology of “parousia” in ancient Greek. The word derives from the verb pareimi, meaning “to be present” or “to be near,” which itself combines para (“beside” or “near”) with eimi (“to be”). Thus, “parousia” literally conveys “presence,” “arrival,” or “being near,” often implying a state of being alongside or attendant upon something.

Heidegger comments:

The Platonic way consists not only in the juxtaposition of idea and reality; rather it is comprehensible only through the relation of temporal Being to extra-temporal Being. This relation is still today expressed in the characteristic Platonic concepts. The relation should be clarified by four limit-concepts or images: temporal Being is an “imitation (mimesis)” of the extra-temporal; the extra-temporal is the “paradigm (paradeigma)” , while the temporal is the after-copy (eidolon); the temporal “participates (metexei)”  in the extra-temporal ; presence (Parousia) of the extra-temporal in temporal beings. (Heidegger, 2004, 31).

Key to understanding Plato’s concept of presence is the form of beauty that the particular will appear in various degrees of (e.g., mansion, average house, shack).  In Plato, Beauty is ekphanestaton, “that which, as most of all and most purely shining of an from itself, shows the visible form and thus is unhidden (Heidegger, 1998, 178; also 1991, 80).” Referring to Plato’s Phaedrus, Heidegger says that beauty is “what is most radiant and sparkling in the sensuous realm, in a way that, as such brilliance, it lets Being scintillate at the same time (Heidegger, 1991, 197).”  Beauty such as that of the cosmos also awakens the divine  enthusiasmos of the person – hence pan-theism.  Heidegger comment in relation to the way a group of young Swabians understood Heraclitus’ hen panta einai,

In its formal meaning, pantheism means: pan-theos, ‘Everything – God’; everything stands in relation to God; [this means] all beings are in relation to the ground of beings. This ground as the One, hen is as ground what everything else, pan, is in it, in the ground. Hen kaipan. The One is also the whole and the whole is also the One … Hen kaipan, this followed Heraclitus’ fragment hen panta einai, Fr. 50, and was according to the spirit of the time the chosen motto of the three young Swabian friends, Schelling, Hegel, and Holderlin. (Heidegger, 1985, 68)

Hence, the term God implies no creator figure in the sense of the God of the New Testament. The term ground here is, though, still ambiguous.  Heidegger notes in our secular age “The enchantment of the world has been displaced by another enchantment (Heidegger, 2018, 41).”  The new enchantment is the achievements of man – man enchants himself through himself.

Given this, some things embody the form more truly than others.  Plato suggests certain things in the sensible world come close to embodying or reflecting a Form more perfectly than others.  Diotima in the Symposium talks about how a lover might see the beauty of the other’s soul, pointing them to the form of beauty, and calling them “beautiful and divine.”    Philosophers, gazing on the Forms (e.g., Justice, Beauty), try to “imprint” (tupos) these patterns onto the city and its citizens. In Republic 592b, Socrates speaks of an ideal city as a “paradigm laid up in heaven” that a just man might embody in his soul.  The philosopher-king or just soul comes closest to “incarnating” a Form like Justice, in the sense of living it out perfectly.  In the Phaedrus (250c-d) Socrates describes how souls, before birth, behold the Forms, and later, seeing beauty in a human reminds them of the Form of Beauty: “When one sees a godlike face or bodily form that imitates Beauty well, he reveres it as a god.”  A beautiful person might seem like Beauty “incarnate” to the lover.

Plato’s cosmology also reflects this in the Timaeus.  The Demiurge crafts the cosmos as a “living being” modeled on the eternal Forms, making it a “visible god” (Timaeus 92c). The universe reflects the Form of the Good or Being as perfectly as a sensible thing can.  The cosmos could be seen as a Form “incarnate” on a grand scale—it’s a physical entity embodying intelligible order. Heidegger comments “We must think the radiant, the ornamental, and the decorative element together in cosmos, which was for the Greeks a customary thought (Heidegger, 1993, 116).”  For the Greeks, kosmos didn’t just mean the physical universe. It comes from the verb kosmeo, “to order,” “to arrange,” or “to adorn.” So, kosmos originally meant something like “order,” “harmony,” or even “beauty”—a well-arranged whole, like a decorated or structured thing. We can think of a soldier’s gear neatly arrayed or a woman’s jewelry enhancing her appearance. Heidegger latches onto this to suggest that the Greek kosmos wasn’t a sterile, scientific “cosmos” but a living, radiant unity. 

We moderns have forgotten Plato’s insight about beauty (I talked about beauty as the medium through which the spectrum of houseness appears: mansion/average house/shack), something Heidegger saw that Hölderlin worked to recover:

“The beautiful is here not some pleasing or charming thing that is collected. ‘The beautiful of the Earth’ is the Earth in its beauty; it refers to beauty itself. For Hölderlin, during the period when Hyperion is poetized, this is the name for ‘beyng.’ In place of many pieces of evidence, we cite one excerpt from a draft, first discovered in 1920, of a preface to Hyperion (II, 546): “I believe in the end we shall all say: … holy Plato, forgive! one has [originally: “we have”] sinned against you mightily.” (Heidegger, 2018b, 150). 

Of course, “holy” here in reference to Plato doesn’t have a pet religious/superstitious connotation like astrology or the Abrahamic faiths etc., but is the contrary of “profane,” and so means “set apart” like someone might say their collection of Heidegger’s personal letters is “sacred” to them.  We might say “that’s holy ground to him,” and so is the opposite of profane (bebelos), something accessible or traversable by anyone.  Of course, your collection of Heidegger’s personal letters would appear in a much less sacred way to you if everyone had some of Heidegger’s personal correspondence, in the same way a comic book collection is less valuable if your comic books are very common.  Action Comics issue 1 with the origin of Superman is worth many tens of thousands of dollars because it is sought after and extremely rare.  In an analogous sense a favorite gospel song can go from appearing in a holy way to appearing irritatingly merely by listening to it 15 times in a row.  Heidegger thus says “Faith has no place in thought (Heidegger, 2002, 280).”  This isn’t to say the world doesn’t appear to many people in a religious tinted manner, since it clearly does, but it is a fallacy to think this objectively reveals something about reality since the world appears in a conspiracy saturated way to many schizophrenics and we wouldn’t say there is any truth of the human condition to that event.

Why is Being specifically understood as presence/ “para” as in “Parousia?”  Heidegger notes Plato, in the Sophist, called Antisthenes doctrine “the most laughable, katagelastotata (252b8),” because it denied that something was to be understood by appealing to something beyond/alongside itself, something “as” something, while Antisthenes himself tacitly adopted a whole slew of ontological structures that go beyond the mere entity at hand, such as einai. Being, choris, separate from, ton allown, the others, and kath auto, in itself.  This is apophasis/kataphasis or the “as structure,” e.g., the dog appears to me “as” not me.  The entity is not simple but rather is complex: The dog “as” brown, “as” it is in itself, etc. 

Aristotle speaks of the being-god of the thinker, athanatizein, the godliness of the philosopher comporting herself to the eternal.  In Metaphysics 1072b, Aristotle states divine thought “must be of itself” and that “its thinking is a thinking on thinking” (often translated as “thought thinking itself” or noesis noeseos noesis)

The philosopher attains the constancy of the stars by attuning themselves to eternal rather than the transitory and fading distraction of the everyday.  Plato contrasted the fixed stars with man’s erratic and disorderly soul and said man should strive for the constancy of the stars.  Democritus said euthymia, living calmly and steadily, was one of life’s goals.  Seneca talks of “a great, noble, and godlike thing; not to be shaken,” a phrase Seneca traces to Democritus.  The divine part of the soul (intellect) longs for freedom and constancy, achieved by attuning to the eternal order—such as the unchanging Forms and the harmonious revolutions of the celestial bodies (stars and planets, which are divine and move in perfect orbits).  Heidegger and Fink in the Heraclitus Seminar comment on Heraclitus fragment 29′ that the noble minded prefer one thing rather than all else, namely everlasting glory rather than transient things.   For example, Toohey notes Horace’s description of Bullatius’s boredom and restlessness as horror loci woes in Epistles I. II were countered by philosophy (verses  25-30), with the exercise of logic (ratio) and prudence (prudential) that brought about acalm mind(aequus animus).  Restlessness being brought to repose with a calm mind seems to be what Heidegger and Holderlin see as the purpose the Greeks had for philosophy. Plato noted the restless soul should strive to achieve the constancy of the stars, a condition Aristotle called athanatizein/godliness/deathlessness, noting only beasts or gods delighted in solitude.  Consider our hidden “being out of joint” which becomes conspicuous in a rainy cottage with nothing to do in shack wacky cabin fever. 

In a famous passage from Homer, which is usually translated so as to suggest mortals are wretched because they die, Krell translates more literally: Apollo says

“Why should I do battle for the sake of mere mortals!’ exclaims the sun god, ‘mortals, who are as wretched as the leaves on the trees, flourishing at first, enjoying the fruits of the earth, but then, deprived of heart (akerioi), vanishing (1, 21, 464-66) … Vanishing how? Akerioi, as … those who are deprived of [heart] (Krell, 1999, 105).”

The sense of the passage is not that of the wretchedness of existence because mortals die, but rather enjoyment and fruition are contrasted with a losing heart {Akerioi) over time. An old person’s heart is no longer in life like when they were in the fire of youth.  This is in line with the ways the Greeks understood the passage from youth where one is transfixed on the lustre of life, which later none-the-less fades with age.  In Epistles 1.8 Horace describes the lethargic illness of boredom as a trait of old age.  Philosophy was seen as a youthfulness, even among the old.  That’s why philosophy was so important for the Greeks.   Heidegger comments:

“Aristotle, Plato’s disciple, relates at one place (Nicomachean Ethics, Z 7, 1141b 77ff ) the basic conception determining the Greek view on the essence of the thinker: ‘It is said they (the thinkers) indeed know things that are excessive, and thus astounding, and thereby difficult, and hence in general ‘demonic (daimonia)’ but also useless, for they are not seeking what is, according to the straightforward popular opinion, good for man.’ … The Greeks, to whom we owe the essence and name of ‘philosophy’ and of the ‘philosopher,’ already knew quite well that thinkers are not ‘close to life.’ But only the Greeks concluded from this lack of closeness to life that the thinkers are then the most necessary – precisely in view of the essential misery of man (Heidegger, 1998c, 100).“

“Radiant the gods’ mild breezes / Gently play on you / As the girl artist’s fingers / On holy strings. – Fateless the Heavenly breathe / Like an unweaned infant asleep; / Chastely preserved / In modest bud / For even their minds / Are in flower/And their blissful eyes / Eternally tranquil gazey / Etemally clear. – But we are fated / to find no foothold, no rest, / And suffering mortals / Dwindle and fall/ Headlong from one/ Hour to the next Hurled like water / From ledge to ledge / Downward for years to the vague abyss (Holderlin’s “Hyperion’s Song of Fate” quoted in Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, 101)” … [Heidegger and Fink commenting on the passage say] “the gods wander without destiny, their spirit eternally in bloom, while humans lead a restless life and fall into the cataract of time and disappear.” (Heidegger and Fink, 1993, 101)

In Ancient Greek, “enthusiasmos” referred to a state of being filled with a god. It was often used in religious or poetic contexts, describing someone overtaken by divine frenzy, passion, or prophetic zeal—think of the ecstatic worship of Dionysus (see Heidegger, 2000, 142-143) or the inspired utterances of the Oracle at Delphi.  The divine within vibrates with or attunes to the divine without such as the divine beauty of the cosmos – pan-theos, pantheism as I said with Hegel, Holderlin and Schelling above.  Thinkers for Aristotle were athanatizein, godly/deathless, a previously chaotic restless soul attuned to the eternal with a calm mind.  Aristotle says in the Politics only a god (athanatizein) or beast is at home in solitude.  This didn’t mean immortal, since the Greeks thought everyone were immortal.  The ambrosia eating gods were ever youthful.  This theme echoes in the Republic (Books 7 and 10), where the soul’s harmony is disrupted by embodiment but can be restored through philosophy, which involves attuning the soul to eternal realities like the Forms. Studies like astronomy help turn the soul from the sensible world to the invisible, eternal order, fostering constancy akin to the stars’ unchanging paths.

Conclusion

By looking at the Greek concept of Parousia (presence), I’ve tried to show that Heidegger’s reading is faithful to Plato within the context of Greek thought generally, and why his insights ring true to our understanding of the human condition today. 

Bibliography

By Martin Heidegger

Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos (Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers) Trns Julia Goesser Assaiante, S. Montgomery Ewegen, 2018

Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance” (Studies in Continental Thought) Hardcover –  Trns William McNeill, et al. September 28, 2018b

The Phenomenology of Religious Life (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 31). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition. Trns Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, 2004.

Anaximander’s Saying in Off The Beaten Track.  Trns Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes.  Cambridge University Press, 2002

Elucidations of Holderlin’s Poetry (Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the Human Sciences) Trns Keith Hoeller, 2000

Plato’s Doctrine of Truth in Pathmarks (Texts in German Philosophy) Trns William McNeil 1998

On the Essence and Concept of Phusis in Aristotle’s Physics B in Pathmarks (Texts in German Philosophy) Trns. William McNeil 1998b

Parmenides (Studies in Continental Thought) Paperback Trns Andre Schuwer, Richard Rojcewicz, 1998c

Heraclitus Seminar (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) Paperback,  Trns Charles H. Seibert 1993

Nietzsche, Vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art, Vol. 2: The Eternal Recurrance of the Same Trns David Farrrell Krell, 1991

Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom: On Essence Human Freedom (Volume 8) (Series In Continental Thought) Trns, Joan Stambaugh 1985.

Language in Poetry, Language, Thought, Trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

Other Authors

Calasso, Roberto.  Literature and the Gods.  Penguin  Random House, 2002.

Krell, David Farell, Kalypso in The Presocratics after Heidegger (Contemporary Contin Philosophy) Hardcover – May 1999 by David C. Jacobs (Editor)

Toohey, Peter.  Boredom: A Lively History Hardcover – 2011