This is a straightforward explication of Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics(IM), which, I think, is one of his greatest works, as it is where he develops this idea that "parmenides and heraclitus think the same." He also touches on spirituality, and the etyomological stuff in interesting, but if you're looking for further reading, read the final section of IM, and specifically the sections of thinking and even the ought, which I wasn't able to include for length reasons. In short, the ought is a "prototype" of being. But I'll write about that later.
In the chapter “The Restriction of Being,” Martin Heidegger seeks to give an account for how the understanding of “Being as such” arose and unfolded throughout the history of western thought; specifically, Heidegger notes “the delimitation of Being happens in four interrelated respects,” those being becoming, seeming, thinking, and the ought. Following the platonic tradition into modernity, Being and its four delimitations have been marked as essentially distinct from one another and Being, totally separated and diametrically opposed. This essay will look specifically at how Heidegger deconstructs the separation between Being, becoming, and seeming by returning to and exploring the originary terms phusis, aletheia, and phainesthai; further, we will see how these terms come together to form a “concealed unity” that grounds both truth and errancy as intrinsic to Being.
We will begin by looking at the separation itself, and how situating Heraclitus and Parmenides against one another perpetuates this opposition. Conventionally, Being and becoming have no overlap; Heidegger explains succinctly the modern position that “what becomes, is not yet. What is, no longer needs to become.” That said, Parmenides is often posed as the proponent of Being, arguing for one, unchanging state of the universe (that is Being); Heidegger quotes Parmenides’s fragment 8: “Being without genesis and without decay… it is all-at-once, unique unifying united gathering itself in itself from itself.” Heidegger’s takeaway, however, is not merely that change is illusory or not real, rather that “Being indicates itself … as the proper, self-collected perdurance of the constant, undisturbed by restlessness and change.” This means that Parmenides did not simply “believe in Being” and not becoming, but that the constancy of Being remains despite change. Let us now move to Heraclitus, where we can see the opposition between the two thinkers dissolve: Heidegger explains that “it is customary to oppose Parmenides’s teaching to that of Heraclitus,” specifically his phrase “panta rhei, all is in flux. Hence there is no Being. All ‘is’ becoming.” The opposition of these two thinkers is only so easily apparent when understood from the contemporary perspective—when we reconsider either thinker relative to the “Greek experience,” in light of phusis, aletheia, and phainesthai, we find that “Heraclitus… in truth says the same as Parmenides.” The unity of the two thinkers lies in a type of constancy, be it the constant Being that remains “undisturbed” by change, or the constant flux of becoming—each view hinges on the Greek conception of phusis as the “emerging-abiding sway.”
To understand the unity of phusis in the two thinkers, we must first elucidate the unity in aletheia and phainethai, or “unconcealment” and “seeming.” Like becoming, seeming has undergone a systematic reduction relative to Being, that is, seeming and being are distinguished as “what is actual to what is not actual—the genuine versus the ungenuine.” Further, Being as constancy is opposed to seeming in that seeming is “fleeting;” things seem one way or another to us, but no longer seem that way upon uncovering the truth about that thing. For example, it could seem quite bright outside, but once I’ve been outside for a while and my eyes have appropriately adjusted, I realize it only seemed that it was bright, though it is not actually the case. This distinction between the truth of Being and the falsity of seeming is not due to their inherent separation, but rather their “concealed unity.” This unity is apparent with the German word “Schein,” which can colloquially mean “shine,” as in “luster or glow” in English, like with “the sun shines;” schein can also mean “seem,” as in “the sun seems <scheint> to move around the Earth.” Yet, most importantly, Schein also means the appearance or “manifestation” of something, as in, “the stars shine: in glowing they come to presence.” Schein as appearance, as “self-showing,” is actually “the ground of [schein as glow, and schein as seem’s] possibility.” Heidegger then explains that “the essence of seeming lies in appearing,” as what “is” must be present-at-hand, and must offer its appearance, its “look,” to us. The sun shines on us and it makes itself present in its warmth, yet the sun also seems to revolve around the earth, despite all of science’s comprehensive heliocentric models. Both of these examples are themselves fundamentally instances of appearing, not merely opinion nor illusion. Thus, Heidegger writes “seeming means the exact same thing as Being here,” that is, being-present as emerging appearance.
Heidegger can say that seeming and Being both mean “appearing” insofar as Being as phusis is the emerging-abiding sway. Heidegger explains earlier how phusis was translated from Greek into Latin as natura, or “nature”—while phusis can be heard as nature in some sense, such as how “human nature” can indicate the activity and behaviour of humans, this is only the case because of the deeper meaning of phusis as the emerging-abiding sway. Heidegger writes that “phusis is the event of standing forth, arising from the concealed and thus enabling the concealed to take its stand for the first time.” Phusis is the way things come to be themselves through their self-revealing; this is a key difference to the Latin natura, as phusis is not any one objective mode of being (as “nature” traditionally means the Earth, forests, animals and the like, but not technology, government or culture), but an event that is intrinsic to the possibility of entities being present in the first place. For the Greeks, the way a plow wears down after sowing the field, the way a state develops its power through democracy, and the way a festival endures through generations are all phusis. Unlike natura, which as an object of analysis is something to be delineated and controlled, phusis involves a receptivity to Being on our part, as things authentically offer themselves to us in their appearing. Phusis is not a deterministic pre-planned appearing of the thing, but the thing’s coming-into-its-own as itself.
The emerging and constancy of Being is deepened by incorporating the original Greek concept of aletheia, or (literally translated as) un-concealment. Heidegger writes that “we thoughtlessly translate this word as ‘truth,’” though, like phusis and phainesthai as nature and mere seeming, this translation reduces the metaphysical implications the word had in the Greek understanding to truth as objectivity. He elaborates that “the Greek essence of truth is possible only together with the Greek essence of Being as phusis… Truth, as un-concealment, is not an addendum to Being.” Truth is necessarily intrinsic to Being—when we say something is “true,” we are speaking about the thing’s real and authentic existence; when things emerge, they open themselves to us, authentically appearing. Their persistence as themselves is then the unfolding and unconcealment of real Being as phusis. Thus, Heidegger writes “wherever there is unconcealment of beings, there is the possibility of seeming…wherever beings stand in seeming, and take a prolonged and secure stand there, seeming can break apart and fall away.” This is the “concealed unity” of Being as seeming and becoming in phusis: each occurs necessarily in the other, as the offered look of a thing “becomes” (as it emerges) itself in its “enduring standing out” in the world. But as the thing comes into its own, its seeming, and any errancy of the being in that seeming, “breaks apart.” Therefore the thing’s abiding eclipses or conceals the thing’s seeming, and vice versa, yet each is originally grounded in Being as appearance.
Being, errancy as seeming, and becoming are unified by belonging together for each other. Errancy is conventionally understood as simply “not true,” or non-being—yet it is because of this belonging-together that not only is errancy possible, but fundamentally errancy is “real,” as Being, and thus on some level “true.” Heidegger explains that “seeming essentially distorts itself in covering-over and distortion… this deception is a part of seeming itself. Only because seeming itself deceives can it trick human beings.” In some sense, this mirrors (in that it functions oppositely) Descartes’s own view regarding deception: Descartes meditates on whether all sense perception could be an illusion, as it is possible that an evil demon is manipulating what “seems” to be real (such as that I “believe” 2+2=4, but this could be the demon’s tricks, and not because it is actually the case). Descartes concludes that nonetheless, we can be sure of the existence of the thinking subject specifically because there must be a subject that is being deceived. While this view ultimately deduces a fundamental “truth,” that of the subject’s indubitable existence, the deception is reduced to non-Being (as the only “truth” is the subject, deception’s existence is still dubitable, and not “real”). For Heidegger, the errancy and deception of seeming is intrinsic to the Being of a thing’s self-revealing; “truth” is not objectivity deduced by a subject, but is the opening-up of Being in a reciprocal relationship with us.
To sum up, a thing emerges and appears, offering a look that “seems” some way to us. As things endure in Being, and their appearance persists, their being essentially unfolds as aletheia (truth). But a thing’s seeming, as Being, is also true, and is the foundation of things’ possibility of enduring, as that constancy of Being as it unconceals itself is constituted by the thing’s look(s). This understanding of Being, as phusis, aletheia, and phainesthai come together to make up the Greek understanding of Being: we can now properly discern what Heidegger is getting at when he says that Heraclitus and Parmenides “think the same,” despite having traditionally opposing views. Both thinkers understood Being not as an “empty word,” nor as an object of analysis, but precisely as the emerging-abiding sway, phusis. When Parmenides says:
The one: how it is… and also how not-Being (is) impossible. This is the pathway for grounded trust, for it follows unconcealment. But the other one: how it is not, and also how not-Being is necessary.
He is speaking specifically of the seeming and becoming inherent to being, the essential unity of phusis, aletheia, and phainesthai. It is not that Parmenides simply believes in Being, and not non-Being, not becoming, but that becoming, as non-being, is necessary to the unconcealment of Being as it persists. Similarly, when reading Heraclitus’s fragment 123, “phusis kruptesthai philei,” from the Greek understanding of Being as phusis, we see the same metaphysics at work as Parmenides. Traditionally translated as “nature loves to hide,” Heidegger offers us a translation that captures the Greek understanding that makes Heraclitus’s fragment even possible to be said: “Being [emerging appearance] intrinsically inclines toward self concealment.” This means that as Being unconceals itself, coming-into-being as it appears, it simultaneously “hides” itself, in that the authentic Being as seeming and becoming are inherently concealed by Being’s endurance. Heraclitus and Parmenides both understand Being as this concealed unity, though they explicate it differently.
The retrieval of Being as phusis from the original Greek conception is one of the most important concepts in Heidegger’s thought, and Being as unconcealment comes to structure his later views on art, humanism, and even God. Our understanding of Being today is fundamentally historical, that is, the way in which Being has unfolded into a type of delineated “object” (and distinct from becoming and seeming with the translation of the Greek into Latin), is not the be-all and end-all of metaphysics and the investigation into Being. By realizing the concealed unity of Being as apparent in Heraclitus and Parmenides, we can open a possibility for doing metaphysics in a way that “leaps” over the contemporary limitations of being, namely, Cartesian subjectivism and German idealism, toward recognizing its constant, dynamic, and intrinsic relationship between our Being-here (Dasein) and Being as it really appears.
Works cited
Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2014.
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