Moira (Parmenides VIII, 34-41)

Meanwhile the beginning of Western thinking was fated to catch an appropriate glimpse of what the word εἶναι, to be, says—in Φύσις, Λόγος, Ἓν. Since the gathering that reigns within Being unites all beings, an inevitable and continually more stubborn semblance arises from the contemplation of this gathering, namely, the illusion that Being (of beings) is not only identical with the totality of beings, but that, as identical, it is at the same time that which unifies and is even most in being [das Seiendste]. For representational thinking everything comes to be a being.

The duality of Being and beings, as something twofold, seems to melt away into nonexistence, although thinking, from its Greek beginnings onward, has moved within the unfolding of this duality, though without considering its situation or at all taking note of the unfolding of the twofold. What takes place at the beginning of Western thought is the unobserved decline of the duality. But this decline is not nothing. Indeed it imparts to Greek thinking the character of a beginning, in that the lighting of the Being of beings, as a lighting, is concealed. The hiddenness of this decline of the duality reigns in essentially the same way as that into which the duality itself falls. Into what does it fall? Into oblivion, whose lasting dominance conceals itself as Λήθη,, to which Ἀλήθεια belongs so immediately that the former can withdraw in its favor and can relinquish to it pure disclosure in the modes of Φύσις, Λόγος, and Ἓν, as though this had no need of concealment.

But the apparently futile lighting is riddled with darkness. In it the unfolding of the twofold remains as concealed as its decline for beginning thought. However, we must be alert to the duality of Being and beings in the ἐόν in order to follow the discussion Parmenides devotes to the relation between thinking and Being.

II

Fragment III states very concisely that thinking belongs to Being. How shall we characterize this belongingness? Our question comes too late, since the laconic saying has already given the answer with its first words: τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ, "For, the Same. . ."The construction of the saying in Fragment VIII, 34 begins with the very same word: ταὐτόν.

87