Shattering Presence: Being as Change, Time as the Sudden Instant in Heidegger’s 1930–31 Seminar on Plato’s Parmenides

Francisco J. Gonzalez

A CENTRAL THESIS OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER’S first reading of a Platonic dialogue, the 1924/25 course on the Sophist, was that, “for the Greeks, being means precisely to be present, to be in the present [Anwesend-sein, Gegenwärtig-sein].”¹ Heidegger saw this Greek interpretation of being as leading to Plato’s specific interpretation of being as eidos or idea. Heidegger makes this clear in the following passage from another Plato course, the 1931–32 course On the Essence of Truth: “‘Idea’ is the look [der Anblick] of what something offers itself as being. These looks [Anblicke] are that in which the individual thing presents itself as this or that, that in which it is present and presencing [präsent und anwesend]. Presence [Anwesenheit] is called by the Greeks παρουσία, shortened to οὐσία, and presence for the Greeks means being” (GA34, 51). In the 1942 essay “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” supposedly derived from this course, Heidegger speaks of the reduction of being in its unconcealment to this ‘look’ that as such exists for a looking: “the unconcealed [das Unverborgene] is from the outset and exclusively conceived as what is perceived in the perceiving [Vernehmen] of an ἰδέα, as what is known in knowing [Erkennen] (γιγνώσκειν)” (Wegmarken, 223). Accordingly, truth is transformed from unconcealment into nothing but correctness in this perceiving or knowing. Furthermore, because this perceiving or knowing takes the form of an asserting (Aussagen), truth as correctness becomes a property of the proposition. Since Plato’s dialectic can do no more than try to compensate for this reduction of being to what is present in a look and this reduction of truth to correctness by opposing proposition to proposition, Heidegger judges it—both in the 1927 Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 25) and in the Zähringen seminar of 1973 (Vier Seminare, 138)—a “genuine philosophical embarrassment.” And in GA29/30, he suggests that it is only “a stopgap measure” (ein Notbehelf) (GA29/30, 453). In both cases, what Heidegger opposes to dialectic is phenomenology, the latter, of course, understood not as the contemplation of static essences but rather as a radical letting of the things themselves show themselves in themselves as they are. What he asserts in the 1923 “Hermeneutics of Facticity” course therefore always remains true for Heidegger: dialectic and phenomenology are as incompatible as fire and water (GA63, 42).

In a letter to Heidegger dated July 10, 1949, Karl Jaspers objects to his reading of Plato, and in particular to what he saw as Heidegger’s failure to distinguish Plato from Platonism, by insisting that the so-called ‘Theory of Ideas’ was only a game Plato played for a while. Jaspers adds, “If the second half of the Parmenides were played anew with contemporary means (and not neoplatonically), all bad metaphysics would certainly be overcome and the space would be cleared for hearing in its purity the language of being” (Jaspers/Heidegger, Briefwechsel, 175–76). R. Petkovšek, in a very perceptive book on Heidegger’s reading of Plato, also cites the Parmenides against this reading, in this case with regard to the nature of time. Petkovšek notes the affinity between authentic temporality in Heidegger and Plato’s notion of the exaiphnês or ‘sudden instant,’ while lamenting that Heidegger did not pay attention to this notion as analyzed in the Parmenides (Le statut existential du platonisme, 306). What Heidegger did not tell Jaspers, and what Petkovšek did not know at the time of writing his book, is that in 1930–31, Heidegger led an advanced seminar on Plato’s Parmenides that has Plato both developing the question of being with a radicality threatening to shatter the metaphysical tradition at its very commencement, and arriving with the notion of the exaiphnês at a conception of temporality that would be lost with Aristotle. The outcome of this earthquake, to use Heidegger’s own metaphor (“Erschütterung der Philosophie als solcher,” [GA83, 28]), is indeed a conception of being as change rather than presence and a conception of time as the instant rather than eternity. Except for a passing reference to the Parmenides in the 1932 seminar on Anaximander and Parmenides as the dialogue in which Plato “unfolded the question of being most radically and most extensively [die Seinsfrage am radikalsten und weitesten entfaltet]” (GA35, 148), Heidegger remained oddly silent about this seminar and its extraordinary conclusions, perhaps because it was so at odds with the story he eventually came to tell, largely inspired by Nietzsche, of metaphysics as the history of Platonism. The goal of the present paper is to end this silence and allow us to experience what is arguably the most provocative and fruitful reading of Plato Heidegger ever achieved.

Some words first need to be said about our sources for this seminar. Many will have learned of its existence only with the publication of Heidegger’s notes for the seminar in 2012 in volume 83 of the Gesamtausgabe. Some, however, knew long before of the existence of a transcript of the seminar in the Herbert Marcuse Archive in Frankfurt am Main.² Indeed, Jussi Backman published an article in 2007 that referenced this transcript (“All of a Sudden”). Even after the publication of Heidegger’s notes, the transcript remains an invaluable and indispensable source. This is because Heidegger’s notes, amounting to only twelve pages in GA83, are neither detailed nor fully comprehensible on their own. In contrast, Marcuse’s transcript, which comprises twenty-four typed single-spaced pages, is detailed, polished, clear, and presents a coherent and comprehensive, line by line reading of the entire dialogue. Indeed, the most important part of Heidegger’s reading, his interpretation of the exaiphnês of the third hypothesis, while alluded to in his notes, is fully developed only in the transcript. It is also only in the transcript that this interpretation is defended through showing how it can explain the structure of all the hypotheses. Unfortunately, the editor of GA83 not only did not publish the Marcuse transcript along with Heidegger’s notes, but does not appear to have even consulted it. Evidence of this neglect is the editor’s claim that the seminar was held only in the 1930–31 winter semester and not continued into the summer semester of 1931 (GA83, 668), even though Marcuse dates and documents with detailed notes six classes held during the summer (June 3–July 15).³ The transcript must therefore remain the primary source for the account of the seminar that follows, though we can find correspondences to some of the main ideas in Heidegger’s notes.

1. FIRST HALF OF THE PARMENIDES AND THE CRITIQUE OF BEING AS EIDOS

The opening of the Parmenides has struck all readers as rather odd. The narrator of the conversation said to have taken place long ago between Zeno, Parmenides, and Socrates, is a man named Antiphon. He must be sought at his home since, though having memorized in his youth what will prove an extraordinarily complex conversation, he now stays out of philosophical circles and devotes himself instead to his horses. Heidegger sees this opening as setting the mood for all that follows:

The introduction provides the fundamental attunement of the entire dialogue: the wide distance from all idle talk, that here the concern is only for the things themselves. The profound solitude of those who philosophize. The dialogue does not arrive at any ‘results.’ We must be ready to endure this, that no ‘results’ emerge. A late work of Plato. Everything is submitted once again to revision, there is a new commencement to philosophizing. (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 1)

We see that Heidegger is here committed to a late dating of the dialogue. There is no discussion in the seminar, however, of exactly when to date the Parmenides, and this is probably because chronology is not really the important issue. What Heidegger wishes to show is that we have in the Parmenides, not a different doctrine from that found in other dialogues, no new ‘results,’ but rather a questioning so radical that it starts again from the beginning and in the process overcomes—indeed shatters—the framework within which Plato’s thought, and indeed the whole subsequent metaphysical tradition, normally pursues its course. The thinking here is profoundly solitary because it is led by the things themselves far away not only from everyday idle talk but also from the metaphysics inspired by such talk. One can imagine that the conversation he memorized so alienated Antiphon from the mainstream of philosophizing that he had no choice but to return to his horses, as Heidegger, for perhaps the same reason, liked to retreat to his Hütte.

Heidegger identifies the position under attack in the first part of the Parmenides as follows: “The thesis of the young Plato, represented here by Socrates, was: the being of beings is the eidos” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 3). But as Socrates’s defense of this thesis makes clear, it depends on assuming a separation between the unity of being and the plurality of beings: the eidos participated in by the many beings must remain one and the same as itself in this participation. Heidegger finds “the whole problem of being of antiquity in an unprecedented formulation” in Parmenides’s objection at 131b1–2 (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 3): how could what is one and the same as itself be at the same time as a whole everywhere in many things existing separately without being separate from itself? What Parmenides’s arguments all seek to demonstrate is that the unity and self-sameness of the eidos cannot be preserved in its relation to the plurality of beings. But Heidegger notes that these arguments depend on treating the eidos, and thus being in its unity, as a being, and in particular as a being present at hand. This is most evident in Parmenides’s comparison of the eidos to a sail only a part of which can be over each person standing under it. But Heidegger therefore sees an important advance in Socrates’s counter-comparison of the eidos to a day that can as a whole be present everywhere at the same time (131b). Interpreting the ‘day’ here not as a measure of time but as Helligkeit (‘clarity’), Heidegger comments, “The eidos is thereby lifted out of the dimension of beings. Clarity is no being, but rather that which first allows beings (as visible) to be present” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 3). In replacing this comparison with the sail comparison, however, Parmenides continues to treat the eidos as one being among others. “Therefore, he can never grasp the sameness of the ἕν εἶδος, the manner of its unity, because he does not grasp being as belonging to transcendence” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 4).

Simply insisting on the transcendence of the eidos, however, does not solve the problem, as Parmenides’s final argument shows. This argument shows that a strictly transcendent eidos could have no relation to particular beings. Indeed, emphasizing the transcendence of the eidos only results in a two-worlds metaphysics: there is the world of eidê separate from the world of particular beings. According to Heidegger, Parmenides performs a double leveling of the being of the eidos in the final aporia: (1) the relation of transcendence between knowledge (epistême) and the eidos is reduced to a relation between two eidê with the claim that the eidos can be an object only for the eidos of knowledge (134a); (2) the whole realm of eidê is turned into a self-subsistent realm of beings through the claim that the eidê can exist in a relation only to other eidê (134d), a claim that destroys the eidos in denying it that relation to the many (polla) that defines it (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 6). But is there a way of answering this aporia? Is there a way of affirming the transcendence of being while still maintaining its eidetic character? Heidegger hints that the characterization of being as eidos is reaching its breaking point here.

Of course, Parmenides will conclude his objections not by rejecting the existence of forms, but by maintaining the necessity of assuming their existence if philosophical discourse (dialegesthai) is to be at all possible. Emphasizing the dia in dialegesthai, Heidegger notes that this is a speaking between several (Mehreren), a Miteinander, in which they all must have one thing in view on the basis of which to understand or even misunderstand each other; and Heidegger claims that what is therefore at stake here is philosophical existence itself (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 7). But the question raised by the dialogue’s first half is: what kind of unity does being have? At the very least, if the characterization of being as eidos further implies that each eidos is separate from the many beings and from each other eidos, such a characterization has proven untenable. Therefore, citing the phrase ἕν εἶδος ἕκαστον at 133b1, Heidegger finds here

the genuine difficulty that lies in this positing of the Eide. In the hypothesis of the hen eidos [one form] as ἕκαστον [each apart] lies immediately at hand the isolation and splitting apart of the eide among themselves: every eidos is as hen an ἕκαστον. The positing from the perspective of μέθεξις [participation] (hen eidos—πολλά) necessarily leads to this splitting apart. The meaning of the following γυμνασία [exercise] is then precisely to grasp the κοινωνία [communion] of the eide among themselves and from here the μέθεξις [participation]; the positing is therefore an inverted one (this is the meaning of the whole reorientation of late Platonic philosophy). (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 5)

What has proven necessary, as Heidegger notes, is what Socrates claims in his response to Zeno to be something worth wondering at (θαυμαστῶς): that the eidê should be shown to be in themselves capable of mixing together and separating (129e2–3). Therefore, as Heidegger observes, “And this γίγνεσθαι [becoming] of the Eide themselves is then actually demonstrated in the gymnasia, and indeed as μεταβολή [change] of the Eide. Μεταβολή becomes the central determination of being!” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 8). But the move towards this new determination of being, if motivated by the need to overcome the separateness of each eidos, will also shatter that conception of being in terms of self-same presence and simple unity that recommended the characterization of being as eidos in the first place. This is suggested by the summary of the first half of the dialogue to be found in Heidegger’s notes:

These attempts to clarify the kind and possibility of the ἕν-character of the εἶδος (1. ὅλον [whole], 2. ἰδέα [idea], 3. Παράδειγμα [paradigm]) break down, but in such a way that: 1. positively, transcendence among other things comes into view, 2. The simple μετάληψις [participation] becomes questionable through and through, 3. the εἶδος- character of the ἕν becomes overall questionable—εἶδος ἄγνωστον [unknowable form] (fourth aporia). Therefore, to be newly determined from the ground up. The constant leveling towards what is present at hand. (das Vorhandene, GA83, 30–31)

The last sentence implies that if the conception of being as eidos becomes questionable, this is ultimately because of the understanding of being as presence this conception presupposes and therefore cannot ultimately escape. If Socrates’s image of the daylight was itself an attempt to get away from conceiving of the eidos as a being present at hand, it did not go far enough since it ultimately remained within a conception of being as self-same unified presence that allowed Parmenides to substitute the image of the sail. What is required is a conception of the unity and self-sameness of being that does not exclude from it difference and plurality.

2. HEIDEGGER’S APPROACH TO THE HYPOTHETICAL EXERCISE OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE PARMENIDES

For reasons that can already be suspected, Heidegger is absolutely insistent on the unity of the two halves of the Parmenides (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides 8; GA83, 32). He also insists that the dialectic of the second half is not a mere exercise or propaedeutic for philosophy, but philosophizing itself.4 Recall that what Parmenides proposes is to consider the consequences of the hypothesis that the ‘one is,’ both for itself and for the things other than it, as well as the consequences of the hypothesis that the ‘one is not,’ both for itself and for the things other than it. There is a tendency to label the different deductions of consequences from these hypotheses as themselves different hypotheses, but Heidegger himself speaks more accurately of Gänge here, roads or ways. Now let us consider the different preliminary questions these deductions raise and Heidegger’s answers to them.

2.1. Why is “the One” Chosen as the Subject of the Hypotheses?

As we have seen, an understanding of the one has been presupposed by all the aporias of the first half since they all concern the unity of the eidos; the question of the character of the one, however, was not explicitly raised, and this is therefore the question that must be taken up in the dialogue’s second half. Because what is at issue is the very oneness of the one, Heidegger claims that the ambiguity of the word ἑν in the hypotheses must be preserved rather than resolved at the outset: “it is the all-one [All-einige]: the only-one [Einzige] and the one-in-all [Eine in Allem]” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 11). As for the ‘is,’ it cannot simply be identified with ‘that-being’ (Dassein), so that the hypothesis would be “if the one exists,” nor simply with ‘what-being’ (Wassein), so that the hypothesis would be “if the one is one” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 13). Instead, the kind of being at issue must include both, so that the hypothesis is to be understood as “the one if it exists as one,” if it is as this oneness. Furthermore, Heidegger sees in the hypothesis as thus understood the fundamental thesis of all previous philosophy “with which Plato must take issue [sich auseinandersetzen]” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 8).

2.2. Why Must the Discussion of the Unity of Being take the Form of Hypotheses?

As Heidegger explicitly formulates the question, “Why must the question of being unfold as an hypothesis (if . . .), and indeed as an hypothesis that continually repeats itself?” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 11). He responds that the answer to the question of being must be always provisional (vorläufig) and that in two senses: it must leap over and ahead of beings as a whole, and it is never final since it must always return to beings and find its confirmation there. He explains this provisionality further when he notes, “The answer cannot refer to something that could clarify, determine what is being questioned—the question in general contains within itself the whole of what is being questioned” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 11). This is why Heidegger, though denying that the dialectic of the second half is only a preliminary exercise, still insists that the dialogue will arrive at no “results.” This insistence on the necessarily dialectical, hypothetical, always incomplete approach to the question of being is striking given Heidegger’s dismissal elsewhere of ancient dialectic as a philosophical ‘embarrassment’ opposed to that attempt to see the things themselves called phenomenology. And yet, as Heidegger’s notes suggest, what is at issue here is still a kind of seeing and therefore phenomenology. The ‘gymnastic exercise’ is to be understood as “the advance into the problem of being: to win for this the right comportment [rechte Haltung] and to develop an inner way of seeing [innere Sehweise]. . . . But these exercises of advancing [Übungen des Vorstoßens] not for their own sake, but the presentation of an uncovering [Enthüllen], that is, what there comes into view [was da zu Gesicht kommt]” (GA83, 31).

2.3. What is the Structure of the Hypotheses or Deductions?

Heidegger’s answer to this question follows from his answer to the preceding question. The different hypotheses or deductions do not build on each other to form some kind of system. Instead, each starts again from the beginning, though with newly won perspectives in hand (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 8–9). Heidegger can here note that the transition from the first to the second is made with the words: “let us return to the hypothesis again from the beginning to see if it will appear differently to us” (ἐπὶ τὴν ὑπόθεσιν πάλιν ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἐπανέλθωμεν, ἐάν τι ἡμῖν ἐπανιοῦσιν ἀλλοῖον φανῇ [142b1–2]). This language is repeated at each transition from one deduction to a contrasting deduction. If we assume eight deductions (the actual number being our next question), the words πάλιν (“again”) and ἐξ ἀρχῆς (“from the beginning”) are also used to signal the transition from the third to the fourth (159b3–4), the transition from the fifth to the sixth (163b6) and the transition from the seventh to the eighth (165e2).

2.4. What Determines the Number of Hypotheses or Deductions?

There are in fact at most two hypotheses: (1) “if the one is”; (2) “if the one is not,” though one could also say there is only one hypothesis which is the one itself. Because the consequences of each hypothesis are considered both for the one itself and for what is called ‘the others,’ the two generate four series of deductions or ways, as Heidegger calls them. Because, furthermore, each way is repeated, as we have just seen, we arrive at eight ‘ways.’⁵ Yet, for Heidegger, there are in fact nine ways, not eight, and this is because between the two ways that consider the consequences for the one “if the one is” and the two ways that consider the consequences for the others “if the one is,” we have another way (155e—157b) that begins with the words “Let’s indeed further speak of the third” (Ἔτι δὴ τὸ τρίτον λέγωμεν [155e4]). The potential disruption this represents to the structure of the deductions is usually resolved by treating this third way as nothing but an ‘appendix’ to the second way.⁶ For Heidegger, in contrast, this third way stands out because it is “the kernel of the whole dialogue (apparent already in its elevated language!), the highest point at which Plato positively arrived; it is here that he provides the determination of being as μεταβολή [change]” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 8). This thesis is stated forcefully in Heidegger’s own notes and has thus clearly motivated his reading of the dialogue from the beginning: “The third stage as the most singular [eigentümlichstes]. The turning point of the whole. Here the problem already indicated by Socrates arrives at its center!” (GA83, 32).⁷

3. THE ‘THIRD’ WAY: BEING AS ‘CHANGE’

To see how the ‘third’ is the turning point of the whole dialogue, we need to say something about what is achieved along the first two ways. The argument of the first way, in brief, is that if the one is one, none of the properties or ‘categories’ considered can be attributed to it,⁸ not even unity and being, nor motion, nor rest, nor any dimension of time. The argument of the second way is that if the one is, then each property and its contradictory must be attributed to it, including motion and rest, along with time past, present, and future. The supposed ‘addendum’ to these two ways that Heidegger considers the turning point of the discussion concerns the notion of the exaiphnês, the ‘all of a sudden’ (das Plötzliche). Heidegger states his thesis without ambiguity in his notes: “In ἐξαίφνης genuine ἕνωσις of the ἕν [becoming one of the one] and thereby of all wholes” (GA83, 33). This suggests that the third way is essential to understanding the nature of the one’s unity and therefore for understanding all the deductions that will be made regarding the one. How does Heidegger arrive at such a startling conclusion?

The arguments of the second way that precede the so-called addendum have attributed to the one a host of contradictory properties, thus achieving what Socrates, at the beginning of the dialogue (129b–c), considered an object of wonder, namely, that the one should be in itself multiple (GA83, 26). How are we to understand this? The ‘third way’ begins with the observation that the one can go from being one at one time to being multiple at another time and vice versa only through the process of becoming one or ceasing to be one. But the problem then is how we are to understand the transition between the state (stasis) of being one and the process (kinêsis) of ceasing to be one or becoming multiple. At this point of transition through which the one goes from being one to being multiple and vice versa, it can be neither one, nor multiple, nor becoming one or multiple. As Heidegger recognizes,9 motion and rest are not understood here as simply properties on a level with the other properties of the one: ‘rest’ is the state of being, for example, one or similar or large, while ‘motion’ is the process of becoming or ceasing to be such a property and its opposite. At the instant when the one starts ceasing to be one and becoming multiple, it can be neither one nor multiple nor be in the process of becoming one or multiple. This instantaneous transition—instantaneous because not in time, since at any time the one would have to be either one, or multiple, or in the process of becoming one or multiple—is what Parmenides calls the ‘change,’ metabolê (or better, ‘shifting,’ ‘switching’), between these states and motions.¹⁰ What goes from being at rest (as being one, for example) to being in motion (as becoming multiple, for example), or from being in motion to being at rest, cannot be either at rest or in motion at the moment of transition, of switching-over, between the two conditions. Furthermore, this transition cannot occur in time since there can be no time at which something is both at rest and in motion (or neither). The transition therefore can take place neither while at rest, nor while in motion, nor at any time (156c–d). Indeed, we could therefore say that it simply cannot take place, but is, as Parmenides says, atopos. This ‘out-of-place’ and ‘out-of-time’ is what Parmenides calls exaiphnês, the ‘all-of-a-sudden,’ and uses to explain all ‘change’ between (μεταξύ [156d7])¹¹ the state of having or not having a property and the motion towards or away from this state (157a). It is only on account of the exaiphnês that the one can undergo opposite properties (τὰ παθήματα πάντ᾽ἂν πάσχοι τὸ ἕν, εἰ ἔστιν [157b4]) and move between them, in which case the unity of the one turns out to be the ‘change’ that occurs in the exaiphnês. This, as we have seen, is precisely Heidegger’s conclusion. What might appear an addendum is, on this view, the culmination and explanation of the two preceding ways: only the ‘change’ in the exaiphnês can explain how both motion and rest can be attributed to the one (145e–46a) in the second way, that is, by explaining the ‘transition’ between them, and how motion and rest can be denied to the one (138b–39b) in the first way, that is, by explaining how the transition cannot be itself motion or rest.¹² The same applies to all the other opposites denied to the one in the first way and attributed to it in the second since the motion and rest at issue here refer to the possessing and losing of such properties.¹³

Heidegger finds in the first way the persistence of a conception of being as presence-at-hand. When Parmenides argues that the one cannot be in any place in part because “if it were in another, it would surely be contained all around [περιέχεσθαι] by the thing it was in and would touch [ἅπτεσθαι] it in many places with many parts” (138a3–5; Gill/Ryan trans., emphases added), Heidegger, drawing attention to the italicized words, remarks, “Such completely plastic determinations of beings show how in this whole first way of the gymnasia being is interpreted quite crudely as being-present-at-hand (here lies a being, there, next to it or surrounding it, another one)” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 9).¹⁴ Furthermore, the time either attributed to being or denied it in the first two ways is time understood in terms of the distinction between what was present, what is not yet present, and what is present. Yet when in their confinement to such a conception of being and time the first two ways arrive at contradictory results, they give rise to the need for a third way that points to a radically different conception of being and time.

Heidegger, however, does not understand the first two ways as an ‘antithesis’: the second repeats the first in determining the being of the one that has been shown along the first way to be in itself “null [nichtig]” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 12). “The question is now: if the ὄν [being] qua one is null (ἕν καὶ πολλά. [155] e5f) [this, for Heidegger, is the result of the first way] and in addition is temporally determined [Zeit-habend: this he takes to be the result of the second way],—how is the essence of being to be understood? And the answer provided by the third way reads: as μεταβολή [‘change’]” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 12). Metabolê is neither one nor many as the transition between unity and plurality, and it is not in time while still being in some way temporally determined as the ‘when’ of the exaiphnês (more on this later). One could say that the first and second ways are, rather than an antithesis, two perspectives on the same one, where the third way reveals what it is about this same one that makes the two perspectives on it possible: being as metabolê. Furthermore, rather than being presented as some comprehensive synthesis, this notion of ‘transition’ is presented as something odd and out of place.

Far from being understood as an eidos separate from the plurality of things and itself existing as something present-at-hand, the one is here being thought as ‘change’ or ‘transition’ that as such is inherently relational or plural and that as such is not present in time. Thus, we find the following in Heidegger’s notes:

When being is in itself relational [verhältnishaft] (null [nichtig]), then is it itself πολλά [many]. But then the difference—as χωρισμός [separation]—between ἕν (εἶδος) [one (Form)] and πολλὰ ὄντα [many beings] no longer holds at all, but only that between πολλά and πολλά. What does this mean? Nothing less than: beings should not and can never as beings in themselves be set over against being, they are as πολλά already ἕν. I.e., the whole problem of the ontological difference, of the distinction between being and beings, is to be determined anew, that is, to be taken up for once as a question! But how? Does εἶδος continue to play a role here? Where in general is the dimension for this difference? Μεταβολή—ἐξαίφνης [Change—the-all-of-a-sudden]. (GA83, 33)

Note how, according to what Heidegger says here, the second half of the Parmenides raises the question of the ontological difference precisely by rendering it problematic. We can no longer, like the young Socrates at the beginning of the dialogue, simply oppose beings to being (interpreted as eidos) through some kind of separation (χωρισμός). The plurality of being itself forces us to rethink its relation to the plurality of beings. One could say that the difference between being and beings is rendered problematic by the appearance of being itself as difference, as the switch-over between unity and plurality that as such is neither one nor many. Heidegger explicitly observes later in the seminar that through the notion of metabolê the eidos itself becomes questionable, and notes the absence of any reference to eidos in the entire exposition of the second half (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 18).¹⁵

Thus, referring to the argument of the first deduction that as partless (ἀμερές) the one must be unmoved (ἀκίνητον), in the sense of not moving spatially and not being altered, Heidegger anticipates, “The overall result of the gymnasia, however, is precisely that the hen is in every way κινητόν [movable], though not as ἀμερές [partless], but as ‘splitting’ itself apart [sich ‘ausschüttendes’],¹⁶ multiplying itself into the many different kinds of beings. . . . That is the enormous step taken by the late Plato” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 10). The motion at issue here is the motion of the Forms in relation to each other that is denied them in the first half of the dialogue in order to keep each Form separate and unmixed. Heidegger explains the characterization of the one as metaballein (‘transition,’ ‘switching-over’) to be found in the third way as follows: the one is characterized as participating in being (μετέχειν οὐσίας), but this participation is not simple possession since it exists in the possibility of not possessing. The one is therefore itself a taking and leaving off of ousia, a generation (γενέσθαι) and destruction (ἀπόλλυσθαι), and thus a motion (κίνησις). This movement of the one between being one thing and its opposite (one and multiple, similar and dissimilar etc.) is itself made possible by metabolê as the transition between motion and rest (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 14). Heidegger insists that this movement of participating in opposite properties is one that characterizes the one itself and not the many things in their relation to the eidos. Failure to see this, he observes, is why “one has perhaps not yet understood the late Plato at all” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 14).¹⁷ Heidegger considers decisive the description of the one during the third way (156b1–2) as Ἕν τε καὶ πολλὰ ὂν καὶ γιγνόμενον καὶ ἀπολλύμενον, ‘being and coming to be and ceasing to be one and many’: the one is not simply one and many, but in becoming one ceases to be many and vice versa, as, we can add, the timeless transition between unity and becoming many, between plurality and becoming one. The solution to the problem of the chorismos ultimately lies in the characterization of the one as itself a ‘participating,’ and, Heidegger observes, “The Ancient problem of being remained standing at this spot!” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 14). As Heidegger puts the point later, the methexis between the many particulars and the one eidos presupposes a methexis between unity and plurality themselves and the latter is the problem of the late dialogues (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 16).¹⁸

4. THE ‘THIRD’ WAY: BEING AND THE SOUL

When at one point he observes that “kinesis reveals itself as the coupling of being [ὄν] with being [ὄν] in the ‘soul’s conversation with itself’ (Soph.),” Heidegger draws our attention to the relation between the hypotheses on the ‘one that is’ and our own way of existing (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 9). He cites the introduction of “word, statement, knowledge, perception, and opinion” (ὄνομα, λόγος, ἐπιστήμη, αἴσθησις, δόξα), denied to the one in the first way (142a) and ascribed to it in the second (155d), as evidence of this relation between the one and the soul. We are questioning in the first two ways the unity of being and the being of unity in relation to our own being, to our naming, speaking, opining, perceiving, and knowing. Therefore, if being in its unity shows itself as metabolê and exaiphnês in the third way, this must reflect on the character of our own being. Indeed, one can claim that what happens in the second half of the dialogue is that the soul’s motion in relation to being leads to the recognition of the motion between the eidê themselves and thus of the motion at the heart of being itself. It is our own soul that ‘switches over,’ in the movement of dialectic, from how the one is understood in the first deduction to how it is understood in the second, whereas in the third deduction this ‘switch-over’ or ‘transition’ is revealed to lie in the one itself. Our motion in relation to being turns out to be the motion of being itself, just as in the Sophist the kinêsis first said to characterize the soul’s being shows up in being itself through the participating of the ‘great kinds’ among themselves. As Heidegger puts it, the transcendence that characterizes the soul’s relation to being becomes a transcendence in being itself (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 9).

That Heidegger in this context refers his listeners to the Seventh Letter is significant because in that work both the change and the exaiphnês addressed in the third way as characterizing the one itself explicitly characterize our relation to being (τὸ ὄν): through the taking place of much association (πολλὴ συνουσία) with the matter itself and living with it (συζῆν), insight into being occurs “all of a sudden” (ἐξαίφνης [341d1]). Later in the summer semester, Heidegger comments, “Unexpectedly [Unversehens]: it is that which cannot be foreseen [das Unvoraussehbares], what withdraws from all measuring, taking care of, from all care.—The inner relation between time and psyche becomes visible; Aristotle: without the soul there is no time!” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 19).¹⁹ Note what Heidegger himself does not explicitly note here, namely, how the exaiphnes provides us with a way of understanding how the one can in the first deduction withdraw from speech, knowledge, opinion, and perception, while still maintaining a relationship to all of these states of the soul in the second deduction. The exaiphnês again plays a mediating role, in this case between the one being unknowable and its being knowable.²⁰ In his 1942–43 seminar on Parmenides, Heidegger defends as his own, though alluding to Er’s ‘sudden’ return to life in the myth that concludes Plato’s Republic, the position that the being of beings can appear to us only exaiphnês:

The ‘it is’ of beings, being, each time shows itself, when it shows itself at all, only ‘all of a sudden,’ in Greek, ἐξαίφνης, i.e. ἐξαφανής, in the manner of something falling right into the middle of what appears [in das Erscheinende] from out of what does not appear [aus dem Nichterscheinenden heraus]. To this essentially unmediated and immediate in-cidence [Ein-fall] of being in the beings that at the same time and only thus appear as beings, there corresponds on the part of man a comportment that suddenly no longer turns towards beings but thinks being. (GA54, 222–23)

Here, Heidegger expresses very clearly how the exaiphnês can characterize both the temporality of being itself (in its self-showing) and the temporality of our comportment towards being.

5. THE ‘THIRD’ WAY: TIME AS THE ‘INSTANT’

Pursuing further the notion of the exaiphnês, we need now to consider more specifically how the radical rethinking of the unity of being as ‘sudden transition’ in the second part of the Parmenides goes along with a radical rethinking of the nature of time. Recall the reference to time in the formula from the first half granted great importance by Heidegger: how can what is one and the same be at the same time (ἅμα) present everywhere in many things existing separately or, more simply, how can the one be at the same time many? What the introduction of the exaiphnês shows us is that this ‘at-the-same-time’ is no time. It shows us that we cannot understand being in its unity-plurality without thinking beyond time as defined by the distinction between past, present, and future. Here we should recall that the first way characterizes the one as not in time (141a–d),21 while the second characterizes the one as partaking of time past, present, and future (155d). The question is how we can think of the one as ‘at once’ not in time and in time. The ‘at once’ that enables us to think this is the exaiphnês. It is on account of the exaiphnês that there can be ‘change,’ for example, from being at rest to being in motion, and therefore any distinction between past, present, and future, but it therefore cannot itself be in time.²²

On a separate small sheet of paper attached to the Marcuse typescript (apparently by paperclip to pages 15–17, judging from the rust markings) is written, “Time divides the different σήματα of the ἕν according to different times: the ἕν is at one time ὅμοιον, at another time ἀνόμοιον, at one time one, at another time many, etc.—Thus the problem: how can the ἕν preserve its unity in this division?” The third deduction begins with this problem in asking, “If unity is as we have described, then since it is both one and many and neither one nor many and has a share of time, must it not sometimes have a share of being, because it is, and sometimes again not have a share of being, because it is not? (155e, Allen translation, emphasis added), but then answers Heidegger’s question in showing that the one preserves its unity in this temporal division as the instantaneous change that exists in no time. “If anticipating we summarize the ‘result’ of the third way very crudely, we can say: being is μεταβολή, μεταβολή is ἐξαίφνης, ἐξαίφνης is not in χρόνῳ; therefore being without time!” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 13). Heidegger explains the last move by noting that the one as “the existing identity of what is different [die seiende Identität des Verschiedenen]” is simply given up if we say no more than that at one time it is one, at another time many, at one time it is the same, at another time not the same etc. (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 13).²³ “The identity of the different: the hen qua hen [the one as one] as μεταβάλλειν [change, transition], is not possible in time” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 14).

If not in the time that, to use Aristotle’s definition, is the number of both motion and rest, however, the exaiphnês is still a temporal concept that therefore arguably points to a radically different kind of temporality.²⁴ Heidegger notes in this context the word πότε at 156c8: when does it change (μεταβάλλει) if it does so neither while at rest nor while moving nor while in time? (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 15). It is this ‘when’ not in time that, according to Heidegger, is immediately said to be atopos.²⁵ But this ‘when’ of the exaiphnês, if not in time, surely expresses time. This is possible because, as Heidegger continues, “the exaiphnês, we say, is time itself. Time is not eternity, but rather the instant [Augenblick]” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 15).²⁶ To conceive of time as the flowing into and out of presence and thus in relation to the abiding present is to conceive of it as an image of eternity (understood as constant presence). But to recognize that the supposed flow of time is made possible by sudden transitions, that the motion and rest measured by time are made possible by the unmeasurable transition between them, is to locate the nature of time in the instant. The full significance of this claim emerges when later in the semester the whole of Western metaphysics is said to be summed up in the thesis that what is not in time must therefore be eternal (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 18). With the notion of time as exaiphnês rather than eternity, then, Plato’s Parmenides stands outside the metaphysical tradition.27 The transcript therefore has Heidegger reaching the following remarkable conclusion: “The third way of the ‘Parmenides’ represents the deepest point to which Western metaphysics ever penetrated. It is the most radical advance into the problem of being and time, an advance that was afterwards not taken up (by Aristotle), but rather closed off” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 15).

6. PLATO MORE RADICAL THAN ARISTOTLE

This claim that Aristotle ‘closed off’ Plato’s radical advance into the problem of being and time in the Parmenides, a claim that closes the winter semester, is further explained and justified as the seminar continues into the summer semester. With regard to the conception of being as metabolê, Heidegger notes already at the very end of the winter semester that Aristotle struggled his whole life with the question of what changes, “Was also schlägt um?” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 15). But, while Heidegger does not say this explicitly, it is not hard to see that if Aristotle ultimately appeals to the hypokeimenon, to something underlying change, in answering this question, he falls back into a conception of being as being-present.²⁸ This is even more evident in the contrast between Aristotle’s conception of time and what is indicated by Plato’s exaiphnês. First, if the exaiphnes is not in time, Heidegger now explains that it is not in time as Aristotle understands time: “The determination ‘no time’ therefore means only: no time in which and at which a thing is something determinate, no time through which something is counted (Aristotle!), no being-within-time” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 18). On July 1, Heidegger explicitly turns to a discussion of Aristotle’s conception of time, “for the sake of contrast [zur Abhebung],” he explains. Aristotle sees the essence of time in the ‘now’ and the exaiphnês is understood only in relation to the ‘now’ (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 19). On Aristotle’s account in the Physics, if you asked me when I came (πότε), the answer would be ‘just now’ (ἄρτι) if the time of my coming was ‘close to the present now’ (ἐγγὺς τοῦ ἐνεστῶτος νῦν), ‘some time ago’ (πάλαι) if it was further from the present now, and ‘suddenly’ (ἐξαίφνῆς) if the time that separated my coming from now was imperceptible due to its smallness (τὸ ἐν ἀναίσθήτῳ χρόνῳ διὰ μικρότητα ἐκστάν [Physics 222b13–15]). Here we see clearly that the exaiphnês, along with the other temporal determinations, is defined in terms of its relation to the ‘now.’ Furthermore, we see Aristotle rejecting the idea that the exaiphnês exists in no time, insisting that the time in which it exists is simply small and therefore imperceptible. The reference to, as well as disagreement with, the Parmenides becomes especially clear when Aristotle justifies his claim by asserting that every metabolê is by nature ‘ecstatic’ (ἐκστατικόν [Physics 222b16]), with the implication that it must be stretched out in time and therefore in time, even if this time is too small to be perceptible.²⁹ This must be the sense in which, according to Heidegger, Aristotle ‘closed off’ Plato’s advance into the problem of being and time (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 20–21). This becomes especially evident when Heidegger notes that Aristotle’s question about the ousia of time presupposes the predominance of the ‘now’ as what truly is, so that the existence of the past as what is no longer and of the future as what is not yet become problematic. “The question therefore remains subject to the presupposition that the meaning of ousia is the now, what stands before me, the present [das Jetzige, Gegenwärtige, Anwesende]” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 20): precisely the conception of being (and time) shaken to its foundations in the second half of the Parmenides.³⁰

7. THE REMAINING DEDUCTIONS STRUCTURED BY THE ‘THIRD’

In the final two classes, Heidegger undertakes a breathtaking discussion of all of the deductions or ways, explaining their structure in such a manner as to justify his thesis that the third way is decisive.31 One way in which he does so is to suggest a fundamental difference between the deductions that precede and those that follow the third way. Each of the first two ways stands on its own and they are indeed the same way repeated. The deductions that follow, in contrast, are not independent but form three pairs: Heidegger indeed labels them 4a, 4b, 5a, 5b, 6a, 6b, instead of 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. “Already this order shows that what is decisive must have occurred in the third way!” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 21). The support Heidegger offers is that at the start of the fifth deduction (or what Heidegger calls 4b) the conclusions of the preceding deduction are taken as ‘evident’ (φανερά) and the goal is to determine if matters for the others are only thus or also not thus (ἆρα καὶ οὐχ οὕτως ἔχει τὰ ἄλλα τοῦ ἑνὸς ἢ οὕτω μόνον [159b3–4]). This appears to suggest that the results of the fifth deduction are simply to be added to those evident results of the fourth deduction, so that the two indeed form a pair. As Heidegger suggests, “I.e. the other result (of the first half) remains standing, the new one is added to this one; both results remain standing together!” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 23). Recall that in contrast the objective of starting again from the beginning with the second deduction was to see “if something might appear differently to us” (ἀλλοῖον [142b2]), thus suggesting a revision rather than an addition. But if Heidegger’s thesis seems reasonable up to this point, the problem is that when we turn to the beginning of the seventh deduction (Heidegger’s 5b), the goal of once again returning to the beginning is described in language just like that used at the beginning of the second deduction: to see “if the same things will appear as just now or different things” (εἰ ταὐτὰ ἡμῖν φανεῖται ἅπερ καὶ νῦν ἢ ἕτερα [163b7–8]). It therefore becomes hard to maintain that the relation between the sixth and seventh deductions is radically different from that between the first two deductions. Nevertheless, the language at 159b3–4 is indeed surprising and may be there to signal that after the third way the results of opposed deductions can and must be taken together, even if this does not continue to be explicitly signaled in subsequent deductions. To this extent Heidegger would have a point.

Yet this is not the only or even most important way in which Heidegger attempts to show the decisive role of the ‘third way’ in determining the structure of all the deductions that follow. The deduction immediately following ‘the third,’ Heidegger notes, turns from considering the one itself to considering the one in relation to the others, the question being what the others must undergo (πεπονθέναι) if the one is (157b6–8). According to Heidegger, what explains and even necessitates this turn to the relation between the one and what is other than the one, and to what the other than the one undergoes or suffers in relation to the one, is the demonstration in the third way that the one is in itself related to many (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 22). Since, furthermore, the one was shown to be related to many specifically as metabolê, Heidegger can even make the rather surprising claim that what he calls the fourth way is simply: ‘if the hen [one] is metabolê!’ (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 21). The conception of being that emerges from the third way, in other words, is now the subject of the subsequent deductions. Heidegger finds confirmation of this reading in the striking conclusion that ends the first set of four (or five) deductions: “In this way if the one is, the one is all things and is not even one, both in relation to itself and likewise in relation to the others” (160b2–3), which receives the reply, “Completely!” (Παντελῶς). In Heidegger’s paraphrase, “what the hen is in relation to itself it is also in relation to the other; it is hen only in so far as it is pros t’alla [in relation to the others]” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 23).

Of course, a viable interpretation here requires an explanation of what ‘the others’ actually refer to. Heidegger considers three possibilities: (1) that the ‘others’ refer to the multiplicity of determinations of the one is ruled out because these are determinations the one is said to have in itself. This leaves (2) that ‘the others’ refer to the multiplicity of eidê with determinate content (as distinct from the highest general eidê), or (3) that they refer to the multiplicity of individual things. Heidegger defends this last interpretation, noting that the contrast between the Forms and ta alla in the dialogue’s first half (132a6 and 132d2), where ta alla clearly refers to the individual things participating in the Forms, appears to be repeated at 158c5–6, where the nature of the multitude of others is considered in itself “different from the form” (τὴν ἑτέραν φύσιν τοῦ εἴδους). Heidegger’s reading thus appears to be as follows: by showing how the one is in itself related to multiplicity as such, the third way has enabled us better to understand the relation between the one and the multiplicity of individual things.

Furthermore, Heidegger maintains that the determination of the one along the third way is what explains the pairing of the following hypotheses when we understand them as follows: his 4a, 5a, 6a (usually 3, 5, 7 on the eight-deductions view or 4, 6, 8 on the nine-deductions view) show the structure of kai-kai (bothand) in their attribution of signs (σήματα) or characteristics to the others and the one itself, while 4b, 5b, 6b (usually 4, 6, 8 on the eight-deductions view or 5, 7, 9 on the nine-deductions view) show the structure of mête-mête (neither-nor) in their denial of signs or characteristics to the others and the one itself (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 22). To see Heidegger’s point, let us briefly consider the conclusions of these deductions. 4a concludes that the others are both like and unlike themselves and each other and then adds that they are likewise affected in all the contrary ways (πάντα τὰ ἐναντία πάθη [159a7]). Heidegger notes that in the second deduction, the one was said to be both like and unlike itself and the others (147c–48d), and he furthermore suggests that if the other properties attributed to the one in the second deduction are not explicitly attributed to the others in 4a, they are implied, as indeed appears to be confirmed by the cited reference to all contrary affections (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 23).32 4b, in contrast, concludes that the others are neither the same nor different, neither in motion nor at rest, undergoing nothing of this kind (οὐδὲ ἄλλο οὐδὲν πέπονθε τῶν τοιούτων [160a6]). 5a concludes that the one, if it is not, is both like and unlike, at motion and at rest, coming to be and not coming to be, perishing and not perishing etc. (160b–63b). 5b concludes, in short, that if the one is not, it has no property whatsoever (Οὔκουν δὴ ἔοικέν γε οὐδαμῃ ἔχειν [164b3–4]). 6a concludes that if the one is not, the others must appear both like and unlike, same and different, in motion and at rest, “and all such things that it would be easy for us now to go through” (πάντα που τὰ τοιαῦτα, ἃ διελθεῖν εὐπετὲς ἤδη ἡμῖν [165d7]), again confirming Heidegger’s claim that not all the characteristics must be explicitly mentioned. 6b concludes that if the one is not, the others would appear neither like nor unlike, neither same nor different, “nor anything else that they appeared to be in the argument we went through before” (οὐδὲ ἄλλα ὅσα ἐν τοῖς πρόσθεν διήλθομεν ὡς φαινόμενα αὐτά [166b5–6, Gill and Ryan trans.]).

Heidegger’s argument is therefore simple: if the third way explains how the one can be ‘simultaneously’ both/and as well as neither/nor the ontological categories, signs, or characteristics attributed to or denied it in the first two deductions, and if all the pairs of deductions that follow the third are structured according to this both–and/neither–nor in regard to the same categories or characteristics, then the third way, far from being a mere addendum, grounds the entire set of deductions. Thus, Heidegger can conclude: “The power of the hypothesis of the third way now works itself out in the inner doubling of the last ways; fundamentally, metabolê and the exaiphnês remain what is at issue in the discussion, even if they are not explicitly dealt with” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 22).³³

If we have three pairs of deductions following the third way instead of only one, the reason is that the last two start not with the hypothesis ‘if the one is,’ but rather with the hypothesis ‘if the one is not.’ But here we encounter another key thesis of Heidegger’s interpretation. The account of the one in terms of metabolê along the third way has shown what Heidegger calls the inherent ‘nullity’ (Nichtigkeit) of the one. From the perspective of the third way, therefore, which again is thereby shown to be the basis of the whole set of deductions, the hypothesis ‘if the one is not’ is not a new hypothesis, much less an ‘antithesis’ in relation to the hypothesis ‘if the one is,’ but is rather a further development of this hypothesis. The negativity or nullity of the one shown explicitly along the third way but evident throughout the whole initial set of four deductions is now made the explicit object of the second set of four deductions. Furthermore, with this focus on the negativity of the one comes a focus on the appearance or semblance inseparable from it. Let us now consider both of these points.

In citing the words that signal the transition to the last four ways or deductions, εἰ δέ δὴ μὴ ἔστι τὸ ἕν (160b5), Heidegger emphasizes as decisive the particle δὴ often left untranslated (by Gill and Ryan, for example). If we do not ignore the particle, we can translate the phrase as follows: “if indeed the one is not.”34 This ‘indeed’ suggests that the fifth or sixth deduction (or Heidegger’s 5a) is not introducing a new idea, but is simply explicitly taking up what has gone before. After all, the negativity of the one has been there from the very first deduction that concludes that if the one is, it is not (141e9–10). If the second deduction then concluded the one to be all things (that is, to have all properties), the third way explained how the one can both be and not be by identifying it with the ‘instantaneous transition’ (metabolê and exaiphnês) between being and not-being in which it neither is nor is not (157a2–3). As Heidegger notes, the outcome of the whole first set of deductions, as expressed in the cited line that concludes the set, is that the one is all things and nothing, and not at ‘different times’ but ‘simultaneously,’ in the instant: “insofar as the hen is everything, it is nothing (οὐδέν), μὴ ὄν” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 23). The hypothesis “if the one is not” is therefore not introducing something new but simply drawing out and further developing what has already emerged in the previous ways of deduction. This is what explains the particle ‘indeed.’ Heidegger formulates in this context an important assumption of his reading: “Each hypothesis is always fuller in relation to the earlier!” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 23).

Heidegger also draws attention to something remarkable about the final couple of deductions: with the not-being of the one, the both-and/neither-nor characteristics of the others become a matter of appearance. As was already seen in the quick summary of the conclusions of the last two deductions, what 6a concludes is the necessity of the others appearing (ἀνάγκη φαίνεσθαι [165d4]) to have all the contradictory properties, and what 6b concludes is that the others neither are nor appear to be any of the things they have previously been said to be (τούτων οὔτε τι ἔστιν οὔτε φαίνεται τἆλλα [166b7]). The implication appears to be that with the not-being of the one, it is no longer possible to distinguish between what the others are and what they appear to be. The language of appearance thus permeates the two deductions in their entirety. What Heidegger therefore finds here is the decisive insight (“die entscheidende Einsicht!”) that seeming (Schein) belongs to the very essence of truth (“als zum Wesen der Wahrheit gehörend” [Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 24]). Heidegger sees confirmation of this in the dialogue’s extraordinary conclusion: “Let us then say . . . that, as it seems, whether the one is or is not, itself and the others, in relation to themselves and in relation to each other, are and are not, as well as appear and do not appear to be, all things in every way” (166c3–5). It should be evident by now that for Heidegger this conclusion does not represent a set of logical contradictions, but rather the truth as revealed through the course of the whole set of deductions. He therefore emphasizes the fact that the response to the cited conclusion, and the final word of the dialogue, is ἀληθέστατα, “most true.” The full truth includes not-being and appearance. As Heidegger states the point, “We have what is most true [Das Wahrste ist], when seeming and not-being are taken up into truth and being” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 24).

Though I speak of a ‘conclusion’ here, Heidegger, returning to the assertion at the very start of his interpretation, insists that this is no ‘result.’ This ‘truth’ is not one that can be fixed in a proposition; yes, the last sentence has the form of a proposition, but it arguably explodes this form in consisting of nothing but what are, in terms of propositional form, contradictions. The Parmenides, Heidegger notes, “leads literally to nothing” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 24). He explains that this is because “the essence of philosophical truth lies in the development and sustaining of an hypothesis,—thus the necessity of practice, of gymnasia!” (24). This picks up on his earlier claim (7) that the substantive problem of philosophy is not to be separated from the problem of philosophical existence.

8. FOR GETTING THE PARMENIDES SEMINAR

When Heidegger several years later publishes, as the only text on Plato to be published during his lifetime, the essay entitled, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” he appears to ignore and indeed betray everything he discovered through his reading of the Parmenides. This is not only because in that essay he attributes a doctrine of truth to Plato, but also because he identifies this doctrine with an interpretation of truth as the correspondence of a fixed look to the static presence of the eidos. There is, moreover, another related betrayal here that concerns more than the interpretation of Plato. As noted at the outset, Heidegger throughout his career maintained a stark opposition between phenomenology and dialectic, dismissing the latter as nothing more than the expression of an embarrassment in philosophy. This involved identifying dialectic with merely a kind of logic that opposes proposition to proposition in the vain hope that such an antithesis will result in a grand synthesis that will yield insight. The seminar on the Parmenides, however, shows us Heidegger discovering a kind of dialectic in this dialogue that does not fit this characterization at all and that rather is capable of questioning being in all its fullness and of arriving at philosophical truth through its very performance. The dialectic of the second half of the Parmenides is, on Heidegger’s own interpretation, a way of ‘seeing’ in the Heideggerian sense, that is, not a looking at fixed essences, but rather an allowing of the things themselves to show themselves. Each new deduction is a re-vision or other-seeing and together they bring the whole truth into view, but only for someone who has gone through the exercise of working through each one.

Furthermore, being in its unity does not appear at the end of this dialectical movement, but rather ‘all of a sudden’ at the points of transition or even reversal, as we have seen this described by Plato in the Seventh Letter and by Heidegger himself in the 1942–43 Parmenides course. The exaiphnês of the third way is not only the non-place and time outside of time in which the unity of being is to be ‘located,’ or rather dis-located, but also the way in which being appears to us immediately and ‘all of a sudden.’ As exaiphnês and metabolê, being, far from being constant presence, is disruption and discontinuity, which makes our access to it also have the character of disruption and discontinuity. In this dialectical movement that through its reversals and contradictions allows being in its unity to appear, we see in action what Heidegger elsewhere considers to be as impossible as fire mixing with water: a dialectical phenomenology or a phenomenological dialectic. With the dialectic practiced in this Platonic dialogue, the question of being is not neglected but, on the contrary, “The question of being is thereby transformed, all has become otherwise” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 24).

The question of why Heidegger persisted in reading Plato in a way so at odds with his own findings in the seminar on the Parmenides, as if this seminar had never taken place, is a difficult one to answer.³⁵ Amnesia or dishonesty are not the only possible answers. It is possible that Heidegger saw Plato’s thought as inherently ambiguous, lending itself to be interpreted both as the beginning of metaphysics and as a challenge to the metaphysical tradition. In the Black Notebooks we indeed find the following observation: “Plato—Aristotle—precisely through their greatness is the ambiguity of their philosophizing augmented” (GA94, 90). If Heidegger considered the philosophy of all great thinkers to be inherently ambiguous, both comprised within the metaphysical tradition and containing unexplored resources for challenging this tradition, then we can understand how he could, in different contexts, read not only Plato, but also Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche in very different ways, now more sympathetically and now more critically. In the case of Plato, one need not turn to the Parmenides seminar to find a reading at odds with the essay “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth”: as I have shown elsewhere (Gonzalez, Plato and Heidegger), one finds that alternative reading in the 1931–32 course On the Essence of Truth, from which Heidegger claims the essay to have been derived (GA34), as well as in the 1942–43 course on Parmenides (GA54) that immediately followed the essay’s publication (where the transformation of truth from unconcealment to correctness is attributed to the Romans!)

The conclusions of Heidegger’s seminar on Plato’s Parmenides are, however, so radical that the supposed ambivalence of Plato’s thought cannot be a fully satisfactory explanation. After all, the dialogue, on Heidegger’s reading, does not simply contain ideas that could be exploited to challenge a conception of being and time in terms of presence, but deliberately seeks to destroy such a conception and explicitly defends and develops a radically different conception. There is, therefore, evidence that, in the case of Plato, Heidegger blamed his conflicted reading not only on the ambivalence of the great philosopher, but also on his own incomprehension. He may have had the Parmenides especially in mind when he made the following confession to Georg Picht shortly after the war: “One thing I must confess to you: the structure of Plato’s thought is completely obscure to me [die Struktur des platonischen Denkens ist mir vollkommen dunkel]” (Neske, Erinnerung, 203). At around the same time, in a letter to his brother Fritz of February 21, 1946, Heidegger wrote, “In the last weeks while proofreading the Parmenides-translation something essential occurred to me about the ‘not,’ the μή, and therefore with regard to the difference [Unterschied]” (Homolka, Heidegger und der Antisemitismus, 134). Unfortunately, we do not know what Parmenides-translation Heidegger is referring to nor even if the reference is to the thinker Parmenides or Plato’s dialogue (though it seems more likely to be the former). In any case, it is to Plato that Heidegger immediately proceeds to refer: “And I see that, before the completion of metaphysics and its essence should come to language, I must once again enter into a conversation with Plato” (134). It seems that Heidegger never did what he here claims he needed to do, since there is no substantive engagement with Plato’s dialogues after this date, even though he continued throughout the 1950’s to promise a rereading of Plato (even in the form of a book) both to his wife Elfride (Heidegger, Letters to His Wife, 187, 212, 241, and 244) and to Hannah Arendt (Arendt and Heidegger, Briefe 1925–1975, 125, 148). We are left, therefore, with the strangely forgotten seminar on the Parmenides from 1930–31 to get an idea of what a renewed conversation between Plato and Heidegger might have looked like and how it might have affected Heidegger’s account of the essence and completion of metaphysics.³⁶

NOTES

1 GA19, 398. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

2 I am simply reflecting what is in the transcript when in my quotations some of the Greek is transliterated and some not. For the Greekless reader, I will supply English words roughly equivalent to the cited Greek in square brackets.

3 The editor Michalski also speculates that Heidegger’s notes are as incomplete as they are because, according to the records of the University of Freiburg, he shared the seminar with the classical philologist Wolfgang Schadewaldt (GA83, 668). But whatever the role played by Schadewaldt, the Marcuse transcript lists only Heidegger as the leader and it is most clearly Heidegger’s voice we hear throughout.

4 Contrast Richard Robinson: “The second part of the Parmenides is an exercise or gymnastic. It does not in itself attain truth of any kind; but it sets muscles of the mind in a better state to obtain truth hereafter” (Plato’s Earlier Dialectic, 264). See also Franco Ferrari, Platone: Parmenide, 108.

5 See Luc Brisson, Platon: Parménide, 45.

6 This view can be traced back to F. M. Cornford (Plato and Parmenides, 194), but see also Mary Louise Gill (Plato: Parmenides, 55); Brisson/Décarie (“Le nombre des hypotheses,” 249–50); and Ferrari (Platone: Parmenide, 150; also 318–19n166)—the latter, while hesitating to call the third deduction a mere ‘appendix,’ still refuses it the status of a ninth deduction and gives it no central importance in his interpretation of the dialogue’s second half. Constance Meinwald, while rightly emphasizing the ways in which the third deduction clearly differs from the other eight (Plato’s Parmenides, 119–23), takes this as justification for pursuing no further interpretation of it, claiming that this “will be part of the investigation of Plato on change, rather than of a study of the structure and purpose of the gymnastic dialectic” (Plato’s Parmenides, 129). For other interpretations that take the third deduction to be an autonomous treatise on ‘change’ with no connection to the hypotheses on the one, see C. Strang, “Plato and the Instant,” especially 73; and David Bostock, “Plato on Change and Time.”

7 Spyridon Rangos argues that Plato numbered the third hypothesis precisely to preempt its exclusion based on the apparent anomaly and asymmetry it introduces (“Plato on the Sudden Moment,” 562–63). Rangos himself notes that his reading was anticipated by Heidegger in the 1930/31 seminar (567–68). Because, however, his only access to the seminar is apparently via Backman (see 567n35), he does not fully appreciate just how close his reading is to Heidegger’s, especially in suggesting that the third deduction, if not explicitly repeated, is always assumed as the center of later deductions (565). As Rangos notes, Heidegger’s position was anticipated by George Grote: “To understand these nine Demonstrations properly, therefore, we ought to consider eight among them (1–2, 4–5, 6–7, 8–9) as four Antinomies, or couples establishing dialectic contradictions; and the third as a mediator between the couples—announced as if it reconciled the contradictions of the first Antinomy, and capable of being adapted, in the same character with certain modifications, to the second, third, and fourth Antinomy” (Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, 310–11). But this, of course, is too dialectical for Heidegger, who, as noted below, insists that the pairs are not antinomies or contradictories and that the third is not a ‘synthesis.’ Rangos is closer to Heidegger in speaking of the two deductions as only ‘somewhat synthesized’ in the third. Vincenzo Vitiello also sees the third hypothesis as explaining all the others and the conclusion of the dialogue (“La terza ipotesi,” 111–12). Enrico Berti, while insisting that there are only eight hypotheses, rejects his only earlier view that the ‘third’ is a mere addendum, arguing on the contrary, like Heidegger, that it is “the solution of the entire problem, that is, the true conclusion of the dialogue” (“Consequenze delle ipotesi,” 59, my translation; see also 67). The important difference is that Berti considers the consequences of all the ‘neither-nor’ deductions unacceptable and so believes that Plato rejects them (67–72).

8 The determinations gone through in the hypothesis are listed in the transcript: “μέρος (ὅλον)—σχῆμα—τόπος—κίνησις (στάσις)—ταὐτόν (ἕτερον)—ὅμοιον (ἀνόμοιον,—ἴσον—ἄνισον)—χρόνος.” Marcuse adds in pencil the note “vgl. die aristotelischen Kategorien!” (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 8). As Brisson notes, Alcinous in his Didaskalikos already found in the Parmenides the ten categories of Aristotle (Platon: Parménide, 286).

9 Heidegger claims that the metabolê is not between the two characteristics, but between the state of having or not having (stasis) a characteristic and the process of losing or coming to possess it (kinêsis) (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 17). This is all well supported in Plato’s text: the metabolê is said to occur “between certain motions and states of rest” (157a1–2) and we are also told that at the instant of transition “the one is neither one nor multiple nor is being separated or united” (157a4–6). What does not appear supported by the text is Heidegger’s treatment of ‘being like’ (homoion) and ‘being unlike’ (anomoion) as also having a special ontological status, the former signifying the possession of a property and the latter the motion through which it is lost.

10 Both Vitiello, “La terza ipotesi,” 109, and Berti, “Consequenze delle ipotesi,” 65–67, see the ‘strange’ (atopos) ‘instant’ of the third hypothesis as the response to what Socrates at the start of the dialogue claims would be an object of wonder

11 Fernando Rey Puente rightly sees an instance of the general importance Plato gives to intermediaries in his philosophy in the exaiphnês of the third way (Ensaios sobre o tempo, 55–57). It is wrong to see it either as violating the principle of excluded-middle (Gill, Plato: Parmenides, 86) or conforming to it (Bostock, “Plato on Change and Time,” 238) because this principle does not apply to what exists outside of any time.

12 One can also claim, with Eric Sanday, that what this section shows is “that the one of H2 calls for and demands the one of H1, i.e., what we can now identify as the substantial form of the one-thatis” (A Study of Dialectic, 146). The same view is found in Mitchell Miller, Plato’s Parmenides, 115: “‘the third’ turns out to save the One of II only by rooting it in the abandoned One of I; the One of II can be only insofar as, in the non-temporal ‘instant,’ it is the One of I!”

13 There thus appears to be a clear connection between what is called τὸ τρίτον in the Parmenides and the characterization of being in the Sophist as “some third thing” in the sense of being neither in motion nor at rest but encompassing both: τρίτον ἄρα τι παρὰ ταῦτα τὸ ὂν ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ τιθείς (250b). Note the relation to the soul; more on this below.

14 An alternative interpretation would be that the first two hypotheses are confined to a spatiotemporal conception of being and that only the third section goes beyond this with the notion of the ‘instant’ (Sanday, A Study of Dialectic, 146).

15 The word εἶδος does indeed occur in the second half (see 149e7–9 and 159e5), but in the nontechnical sense of characteristic or property that it often, indeed most often, has in Plato’s dialogues. An exception, however, appears to be a passage that Heidegger himself later draws attention to, namely, 158c5–6, where ta alla are contrasted to the nature of the form.

16 Marcuse adds in a handwritten note: κεκερματισμένον 144e4.

17 Apparently because his interpretation of the dialogue’s second half continues to maintain a sharp separation between what he calls ‘eidetic being’ and ‘spatio-temporal being,’ Sanday claims that “the notion of eidetic complex, i.e., forms composed of forms” is “here completely avoided,” so that the account of being in the Sophist goes “well beyond” the Parmenides (A Study of Dialectic, 165). For Heidegger, this is not at all the case, since forms are in question from the very beginning of the gymnastic exercise, a major aim of which is overcoming the ‘separation’ between forms and spatiotemporal beings. Vitiello makes the connection between the Parmenides and the Sophist clear when he writes, “It is in the exaiphnes that beings, beings as such—all beings reveal themselves as that which they are: δυνάμενα συγκεράννυσθαι καὶ διακρίνεσθαι” (“La terza ipotesi,” 110, my translation).

18 Heidegger grants, however, that it remains questionable and obscure how the koinonia between the Eide can tell us anything about the relation between the many particulars and the Eidos (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 14).

19 The excellent discussion in Rangos, “Plato on the Sudden Moment,” makes the connection between the ἐξαίφνης used to describe a mental experience in Plato’s other dialogues and the ἐξαίφνης analyzed in the Parmenides: see especially 538–41 and 553.

20 See Vitiello, “La terza ipotesi,” 105–7.

21 According to Heidegger, it is the denial of time to the one in the first deduction that requires us to start over again. Without time there is no one, without the one no being, without being no beings. So we must start again! (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 9).

22 Incredibly, J. Palmer’s discussion of time in the Parmenides (Plato’s Reception of Parmenides, 199–206) ignores the third deduction with its notion of the exaiphnês completely. This, indeed, is not so incredible given his decision to dismiss the third deduction as “minor irregularities” (Plato’s Reception of Parmenides, 157). This enables Palmer simply to reject the first deduction and take the second deduction as saying all there is to say about the temporality of the one, despite the appearance that the timelessness attributed to the one in the first deduction more closely parallels the denial of temporal attributes to the intelligible living creature in the Timaeus (37e–38a), an appearance Palmer, of course, attempts to dispel.

23 We thus see how the temporal one of the second deduction presupposes, rather than contradicts, the atemporal one of the first deduction. This is seen by Rangos (“Plato on the Sudden Moment, ” 543n7; 544), but not by R. Polansky and J. Cimakasky, who propose, quite implausibly, that the ‘sometimes’ cited above refers only to the different times at which Parmenides and Aristotle were speaking of the one: “Sometimes they were saying that the one partakes of being, and sometimes they were saying that it does not partake of being” (“Counting the Hypotheses,” 233). Carlos Alberto Cavarjal Correa maintains that the first deduction is not at all under consideration at 155e (“El ‘Instante’ en Platon,” 77), but misquotes 155e5–6, leaving out the “neither one nor many,” and ignores the role the exaiphnês plays as outside of time (79). Berti also takes the ‘third’ to refer back only to the one of the second deduction, taking it to be ‘third’ only in relation to two sets of consequences of the second deduction: (1) that it is one and many (Berti also appears to ignore the ‘neither one nor many’) and (2) that it is in time (“Consequenze delle ipotesi,” 63–64). Brisson and Décaire also take the ‘third’ to refer back only to the second deduction, but identify the preceding ‘two’ as (1) the reformulation of the thesis (“if the one is”) and (2) the deduction of the ten consequences (“Le nombre des hypotheses,” 251): a rather incongruous ‘three.’ Furthermore, while not ignoring the “neither one nor many,” they effectively get rid of it by claiming that “neither one = many” and “neither many = one,” so that “neither one nor many” = “many and one” (“Le nombre des hypotheses,” 252–53). Why, then, the redundancy? Bostock, in contrast, sees the whole phrase at 155e5–6 as necessarily referring back to both preceding deductions (“Plato on Change and Time,” 235).

24 That both the one that is one and many, i.e. the one of the second deduction, and the one that is neither one nor many, i.e. the one of the first deduction, should be described as participating in time (μετἐχον χρόνου) indicates, for Heidegger, a temporality distinct from the time denied the one in the first and attributed to it in the second deduction. See Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 15–16.

25 Vitiello expresses this atopia very well when he characterizes the exaiphnês as a ‘when’ without time at which a change without change takes place without a place (“La terza ipotesi,” 110).

26 That the essence of time is the Augenblick is maintained by Heidegger himself in the immediately preceding course of 1929–30 (GA29/30, 224). The notion is of course already introduced in Sein und Zeit in connection with authentic temporality (338), but associated there only with Kierkegaard. In a letter written almost two decades after Sein und Zeit to his brother Fritz, Heidegger observes: “Kierkegaard’s knowledge that the ‘moment’ is ‘eternity’ touched upon, in this Christian form, a truth that has not yet been grasped” (Homolka, Heidegger und der Antisemitismus, 94, my trans.). The problem, however, is precisely this ‘Christian form.’ As the note in Sein und Zeit explains, Kierkegaard “remains stuck in the vulgar concept of time and determines the moment with the help of the now and eternity” (338). It is precisely this that the discussion in the Parmenides avoids. Yet, outside of the present seminar, Heidegger never mentions the Parmenides in this context with one exception, to my knowledge: another unpublished seminar, this time on Hegel from 1925–26. In a transcript of this seminar, preserved with the papers of Helene Weiss at Stanford University, the account of the exaiphnês in the Parmenides is cited twice. The first citation is followed by the claim that the instant is eternity, but then this is significantly crossed out and the claim is restricted to Kierkegaard’s theological interpretation (Weiss, Heidegger: Hegel Seminar, 72). The second citation is made in connection with the claim that Aristotle interprets time from the present, but with this enigmatic qualification: “Plato in a certain sense goes beyond this conception of time” (Weiss, Heidegger: Hegel Seminar, 79). This suggestion that Plato’s exaiphnês is neither Kierkegaard’s eternity nor Aristotle’s ‘now’ is apparently pursued only five years later.

27 Heidegger emphasizes that ‘change’ is said to occur not simply ‘in’ the exaiphnês (as at 156d1), as if it were something static and abiding, but also from (ἐκ) it towards the two opposed characteristics (156d4) (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 18). The exaiphnês itself changes and Heidegger apparently hazards the following: τὸ ἐξαίφνης μεταβάλλει εἰς μεταβολήν. (Bostock suggests something similar, but sees this as producing an infinite regress [“Plato on Change and Time,” 237].) The tendency in the literature, in contrast, is to identify the ‘instant’ with ‘eternity.’ Polansky and Cimakasky thus speak of “the ‘eternal’ instant” (“Counting the Hypotheses,” 240), sliding from the claim that the one “must keep entering the instant” to the claim that it “must always be in the instant” and therefore describing it as existing “unchangingly outside time” (“Counting the Hypotheses,” 237). In contrast, Rangos defends a position much closer to Heidegger’s when he distinguishes the ‘sudden’ from the ‘now,’ seeing in the latter the timeless aspect of the present and in the former the aspect of the present open to change or becoming (“Plato on the Sudden Moment,” 551–52). But while Rangos appears to restrict all change or becoming to the manifestations of the Forms in spatio-temporal beings (“Plato on the Sudden Moment,” 570), thus preserving the timeless eternity of the Forms themselves, Heidegger’s position is more radical in taking change in the sudden moment to characterize the Forms themselves in their participation in each other. A position similar to that of Rangos is found in Miller (Plato’s Parmenides, 120–21) and Brisson, who make a distinction between the unchanging instant of eternity and the fleeting instant that connects this eternity to time (“L’instant, le temps,” 394, 396). Correa likewise locates in the instant not the one itself but “the eternal hope of the One, of participating in eternity” (“El ‘Instante’ en Platon,” 80, my translation). C. Strang, “Plato and the Instant,” distinguishes between the now as an ‘atomic duration’ and the ‘sudden’ as a durationless instant, but this makes little sense of the text, as is shown by K. W. Mills, “Plato and the Instant.”

28 On the difference between the understandings of change in Plato and Aristotle, see Correa, “El ‘Instante’ en Platon,” 78.

29 Heidegger leaves open the question of whether there is in Aristotle an essential relation between the exaiphnês and metabolê, appearing to think this depends on whether Physics 222b16–27 has any essential connection to the discussion of the exaiphnês (Marcuse, Plato: Parmenides, 21).

30 If Heidegger nevertheless ends his discussion without reaching a final conclusion, it may be because he recognizes some truth in what R. E. Allen has suggested: “The account Parmenides offers of the instant is in fact closely similar to Aristotle’s account of the now” (Plato’s Parmenides, 311). Rangos makes the same point but with the important and necessary qualification: “It [the ἐξαίφνης] may reasonably be said to be the same as the Aristotelian νῦν, though such an equation misses the unexpected character of the sudden moment which Plato wished to underline” (“Plato on the Sudden Moment,” 570). Brisson notes that Aristotle has no use for Plato’s notion of the exaiphnês because for him the ‘now’ is a principle of the continuity of time (Platon: Parménide, 274–75n362).

31 This part of the seminar, as well as the discussion of Aristotle’s conception of time, are utterly absent from Heidegger’s own notes, suggesting that these notes are confined to the seminar as presented in the winter semester.

32 This point is also made by Meinwald, Plato’s Parmenides, 120.

33 Polansky and Cimakasky defend the thesis that there are nine hypotheses by arguing that only by counting the third do we arrive at a structure within which the odd-numbered hypotheses lead to ‘neither . . . nor’ conclusions while the even-numbered hypotheses lead to ‘both . . . and’ conclusions (“Counting the Hypotheses,” 231). Though they present this as a new suggestion, it was already made by Vitiello, “La terza ipotesi,” 90–91. The Polansky and Cimakasky interpretation, however, requires treating the third section as leading to ‘neither . . . nor’ conclusions in the same way the other oddnumbered hypotheses do (though they seem to back away from this somewhat towards the end; see “Counting the Hypotheses,” 242), whereas the third section is as concerned with showing how the one can have both of a set of contradictory predicates as it is with showing how it can have neither.

34 This is also Brisson’s translation: “si effectivement il n’est pas cet un” (Platon: Parménide).

35 Backman suggests the following explanation: “However, if this was indeed Heidegger’s conclusion in the seminar, the fact that Heidegger did not later systematically return to the Parmenides suggests that he is hesitant about this reading and remains as perplexed by the enigmatic dialogue as most other interpreters” (Complicated Presence, 259n100). Vincenzo Cicero, who explicitly asks about “the strange Heideggerian oblivion regarding the exaiphnes” has another suggestion, i.e. that his discovery of the exaiphnês in the Parmenides put into serious crisis Heidegger’s Seinsgeschichte and therefore had to be suppressed in favor of the latter (“Henologia e oblio dell’Essere”).

36 Research for this paper was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I also wish to acknowledge the help of Stephen Roeper in accessing the material in the Marcuse Archive.

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Francisco J. Gonzalez - Shattering Presence: Being as Change, Time as the Sudden Instant in Heidegger’s 1930–31 Seminar on Plato’s Parmenides
Original PDF.

Ereignis