being at all. Whoever does not think idealistically in his epistemology believes himself, especially nowadays, superior to the so-called critical theories and believes he is the guardian of the medieval and ancient tradition, whereas he only represents the reverse side of idealism; he also thinks in epistemological terms and cannot, even less than others, grasp the problem.
If one then has any grasp at all of the basic problems of ancient philosophy and seizes them at their roots with sufficient radicality, then it cannot be the case that the issue is a position or viewpoint, in the sense of a realism or idealism. And this is so not only because both are equally untenable as epistemological formulations of the problem, but because the basic problem (being) is not at all a problem of epistemology; the problem of being is prior to every problem of epistemology. To see this, one has to have truly grasped the basic problems of ancient metaphysics and to understand them concretely.
An easily accessible reflection in the Theaetetus (185a fr.) shows how Plato develops the claim of Parmenides regarding νοεῖν and εἶναι as the problem of the relation of being to the soul, the ψυχή. There Socrates explains to Theaetetus that "you cannot grasp being, otherness, sameness, and equality by hearing or sight. And yet you do say 'they are,' though you neither see nor hear them. If you say 'salty,' you know which capacity, namely taste, you must depend on. For being, on the contrary, no bodily organs are to be found, but it seems to me that the soul of itself takes everything into view that we say about everything insofar as it is:' This passage shows that we do not attain the primary kind of being-determinations through the bodily organs, but the soul itself, purely of itself, according to its intrinsic freedom, relates to being. Of itself the soul extends itself out of itself toward being, i.e., it is the soul, purely by itself, that, in the manner of ἐπόρεξις [stretching out towards], understands anything like being.
To understand Parmenides' approach and his development in Greek philosophy we have to keep two things in mind: 1) The ὄν [being] is not ontically derived from νοεῖν or λέγειν (These latter are, moreover, a δηλοῦν, a making manifest); 2) We are not dealing with an epistemological claim concerning an inversion of the standard by which knowledge is measured. Both misinterpretations rest metaphysically on the subject-object relation and take the problem too lightly. As the passage in the Theaetetus showed, the problem instead concerns being, though only incipiently, and this problem is oriented to the "subject" as ψυχή. In this, what we call subjectivity is still tenuous. We must accordingly distinguish