danger of misinterpretation, refer to a word of the thinker Parmenides who, along with Heraclitus, thinks the inception. The word of Parmenides (fragment 13) reads:
πρώτιστον μὲν Ἔρωτα θεῶν μητίσατο πάντων.
As first, certainly, Eros, of all the gods, (she) was devised.
To de-vise means here to con-ceive in advance: to give, as the pro-vision, the poverty of all necessity. ‘Eros,’ thought essentially, is the poetic name for the contemplative word ‘favor,’ insofar as this word names the now dawning essence of φύσις. According to the word of Parmenides (as quoted from Plato’s Symposium)1, [133] who here brings about the de-vising cannot immediately be identified. The word of Parmenides is being adduced here to illustrate that, in the inception, it is relationality that unfolds, and not some thing or condition. However, the word of Parmenides could only be adequately considered if we were first to bring to mind a sufficient concept regarding what the Greeks meant by θεοί.)
Emerging as emerging in no way evades self-occluding, but rather claims self-occluding for itself as that which bestows emerging and that which alone and always grants the sole bestowal for the emerging. One grants itself to the other. In this granting, the intimacy of both is granted the simple ‘essence.’ φιλία and φιλεῖν do not first befall φύσις. The establishing of emerging back into a prior self-occluding; the overcoming of emerging by self-occluding; also, the pre-establishing of self-occluding in emerging: favor is the manner in which these unfold. Favor, again, is not something separate and apart from φύειν and κρύπτεσθαι: rather, granting has the essential character of emerging and self-occluding. Favor is the intimacy of the simple differentiation; granting lets the pure clearness arise in which emerging and self-concealing are held both apart from, and toward, one another, and thus struggle with one another for the simple bestowing of the simply granted essence. Favor is the essential feature of ἔρις (strife), provided that we think this inceptually and do not conceive of it only as discord and disputation based upon the contrariety of disfavor and resentment.
Emerging grants to self-occluding that the latter allot the essence to the former, thus vouchsafing itself in the favor of its own essence, which is granted to it through emerging. Whatsoever unfolds as the simplicity of the favor of the concealing emerging allows itself to be called by the single word φύσις. [134] We hear and read this isolated word according to the customary way in which a word corresponds to an object. We say ‘house’ and mean the corresponding object. We say ‘mountain’ and mean that particular, imagined thing. We say φύσις and at first believe, at least according to the preceding explanation, that our imagination must
1 Plato, Symp. 178b.