1. The pre-Socratics: The hidden clearing is discovered but not questioned.
2. Metaphysics: From Plato through Nietzsche the clearing gets increasingly overlooked.
3. Today: The overlooking of the clearing is itself overlooked.
4. Tomorrow: Heidegger holds out the possibility of rescue from oblivion of the clearing.
1. THE PRE-SOCRATICS: THE HIDDEN CLEARING IS DISCOVERED BUT NOT QUESTIONED
In its briefest formulation, Heidegger argues that the pre-Socratics (we will limit the discussion to Parmenides and Heraclitus) discovered the hidden clearing, ἀλήθεια-1, but failed to see that the appropriation of ex-sistence is the reason why there is a clearing at all.8
Heidegger thought the ancient Greeks, or at least their artists and thinkers, were gifted with a sense of the excess of meaningful presence: he thought this was the heart of Greek experience in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE.9 But what about the origin of such presence? Heidegger argued that Parmenides and Heraclitus were indeed aware of what accounts for the presence of things. Parmenides called it ἀλήθεια, Heraclitus called it ϕύσις (two names for the same thing),10 and for Heidegger this was the height of Greek thinking. But overwhelmed by the immediacy of the hidden source of presence, Parmenides and Heraclitus did not ask about the origin or “whence” of ἀλήθεια-1.11 Hence the “first beginning” of awareness of the clearing stands in need of “another beginning,” which happened when Heidegger saw that the appropriation of ex-sistence is why there is a clearing at all. This discovery went one step further back than the pre-Socratics had gone (not to mention Plato and Aristotle), and in that regard Heidegger says, “When one thinks about appropriation, one is no longer thinking with the Greeks at all.”12
8. To keep the argument succinct I pass over Heidegger’s 1942 retrieval of the “unsaid” of Anaximander’s τὸ χρεόν (fragment 1), but mutatis mutandis the outcome is the same.
See GA 78 and, taken from that ms., GA 5: 321–373 = 242–281.
9. See GA 4: 88.6–7 = 112.29–30: “angesichts des Übermaßes des Geschickes und seiner Schickungen.” The Greeks also had an awareness of human being as the place where the power of this saturating presence was creatively at work.
10. GA 40: 109.26–27 = 112.12–14;
GA 66: 111.18–19 = 93.6–7;
GA 15: 344.5 = 46.30.
11. Sophocles, too. GA 40: 159.4 = 166.27: “das Überwältigende.”
12. GA 15: 366.31–32 = 61.4: “Mit Ereignis wird überhaupt nicht mehr griechisch gedacht.”
GA 12: 127. 19–20 = 39.32: “nicht mehr, nie mehr griechisch.”
GA 66: 315.8–10 = 280.22–24.