gathering itself in itself from itself (holding itself together full of presentness).2
These few words stand there like archaic Greek statues. What we still possess of Parmenides’s didactic poem fits into one slim volume, one that discredits the presumed necessity of entire [74|104] libraries of philosophical literature. Anyone today who is acquainted with the standards of such a thinking discourse must lose all desire to write books.
What is said here from within Being are σήματα—not signs of Being, not predicates, but that which indicates Being itself in view of Being and from within Being. In such a view of Being, we must look away from all genesis, passing away, and so on, and look beyond them in an active sense: in our seeing, we must keep them away, expel them. What is kept away through the a- and the οὐδέ <“not” and “nor”> is not commensurate with Being. It has another measure.
We conclude from all this that Being indicates itself to this saying as the proper, self-collected perdurance of the constant, undisturbed by restlessness and change. Even today, in accounts of the inception of Western philosophy, it is customary to oppose Parmenides’s teaching to that of Heraclitus. An oft-cited saying supposedly derives from Heraclitus: πάντα ῥεῖ, all is in flux. Hence there is no Being. All “is” becoming.
One finds nothing out of order in the occurrence of such oppositions—here Being, there becoming—because they confirm a rule that applies from the inception of philosophy onward, a rule that supposedly spans its entire history, namely that when one philosopher says A, the other says B, but when the latter says A, then the former says B.
2. The more unconventional elements of Heidegger’s translation are: 1) he renders νῦν ἔστιν as “as the present, it is,” rather than as “it now is”; 2) ἕν, usually translated simply as “one,” becomes “unique unifying united”; 3) συνεχέϛ, usually translated as “continuous,” is glossed as “gathering itself in itself from itself (holding itself together full of presentness).”