EARLY GREEK THINKING

Only on the basis of Being, so considered, can we first ask with adequate thoughtfulness what "history" might mean here. History is the destining of the duality. It is the revealing, unfolding bestowal of luminous presencing in which what is present appears. The history of Being is never a sequence of events which Being traverses for itself. It is certainly not an "object" which might offer new possibilities of historical representation, willing to put itself in the place of prior observations of the history of metaphysics with the presumption of knowing better than they.

What Parmenides in his inconspicuous subordinate clause says about Μοῖρα, into whose grasp ἐόν has been released as the duality, reveals to the thinker the breadth of vision fatefully reserved for the path he treads. For in this expanse appears that in which the presencing (of what is present) manifests itself: τὰ σήματα τοῦ ἐόντος. There are many (πολλά) of these σήματα. They are not signposts for something else. They are the manifold shining of presencing itself, out of the unfolded duality.

VII

But we have not yet exhaustively recounted what it is that Μοῖρα in its dispensing metes out. Therefore an essential feature of the nature of its governance still remains unthought. What is the significance of the fact that destiny releases the presencing of what is present into the duality, and so binds it to wholeness and rest?

To take proper measure of what Parmenides says about this problem in the lines that follow his subordinate clause (VIII, 39 ff.), it is necessary to recollect something previously mentioned (III). The unfolding of the twofold reigns as φάσις, saying as bringing-forward-into-view. The duality conceals within itself both νοεῖν and its thought (νόημα) as something said. What is taken up in thinking, however, is the presencing of what is present. The thoughtful saying that corresponds to the duality is the λέγειν, the letting-lie-before of presencing. It occurs, and occurs only, on the thought-path of the thinker who has been called by Ἀλήθεια.

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