Instead:
1. The determination of the essence of the human being is never an answer, but is essentially a question.
2. The asking of this question and its decision are historical—not just in general, but as the essence of history.
3. The question of who the human being is must always be posed in an essential connection with the question of how it stands with Being. The question of the human being is not an anthropological question, but a historically meta-physical question. [The question cannot be asked adequately within the domain of traditional metaphysics, which essentially remains “physics.”]
Therefore we may not misinterpret what is called nous and νοεῖν in Parmenides’s statement according to some concept of the human being that we have brought with us, but instead we must learn to experience the fact that the Being of the human first determines itself on the basis of the happening of the essential belonging together of Being and apprehending.
What is the human being in this sway of Being and apprehending? The beginning of fragment 6, which we have met before <p. 123>, gives us the answer: χρὴ τὸ λέγειν τε νοεῖν τ’ἐὸν ἔμμεναι: needful is λέγειν as well as apprehending, namely, the being <das Seiend> in its Being.45
By no means are we allowed yet to take νοεῖν here as thinking. Neither is it enough to conceive of it as apprehending if we then, unwittingly and as is the custom, take apprehending as a faculty, as a mode of behavior of the human being, whom we represent to ourselves according to an empty and pale biology
45. Conventional translation: “It is necessary both to say and to think that being is.”