Moira (Parmenides VIII, 34-41)


We are aided in our purpose by the insight that thinking, when brought forward into view within the duality of the ἐόν, is something said therein, πεφατισμένον.

As a result, what reigns in the duality is φάσις, saying as the invocative and insistent bringing-forward-into-view. What does the saying bring to appear? The presencing of what is present. The saying that comes to pass and governs in the duality is the gathering of presencing, in whose shining what is present can appear. What Parmenides thinks as Φύσις Heraclitus calls the Λόγος, the letting-lie-before that gathers.

What happens in Φύσις and in Λόγος? Could the gathering-calling saying which reigns in them be that bringing which brings forth a shining? Which gives the lighting in whose endurance presencing is first illuminated, so that in its light what is present appears, thus governing the duality of both? Could the unfolding of the twofold consist in this, that a shining which illuminates itself comes to pass? The Greeks experience its basic character as disclosure [Entbergen]. Correspondingly, disclosure reigns in the unfolding of the twofold. The Greeks call it Ἀλήθεια.

If indeed Parmenides was saying something about Ἀλήθεια, he must have been thinking within the unfolding of the twofold. Does he mention Ἀλήθεια? Of course he does, right at the beginning of his "Didactic Poem." Even more: Ἀλήθεια is the goddess. Listening to what she says, Parmenides speaks his own thought—although he leaves unsaid what the essence of Ἀλήθεια might be rooted in. He also leaves unthought in what sense of divinity Ἀλήθεια is a goddess. All this remains for the early thinking of the Greeks as obviously outside the realm of the thought-provoking as any explanation of the enigmatic key word, τὸ αὐτὸ, the Same. {GA 7: 253}

Presumably, however, there is some hidden link connecting all these unthought elements. The introductory lines of the poem (I, 22 ff.) are not poetical finery masking an abstract conceptual work. We make the dialogue with Parmenides' way of thinking too easy if we ignore the mythic experience in the philosopher's words, and then object that the goddess Ἀλήθεια is an extremely vague and empty mental construct in comparison with the sharply delineated "divine persons," Hera, Athene, Demeter, Aphrodite, and Artemis.


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Martin Heidegger (GA 7) Early Greek Thinking