Hans-Georg Gadamer the Beginning of Philosophy 2000

THE BEGINNING OF PHILOSOPHY

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Hans-Georg Gadamer

THE

OF

Translated by Rod Coltman

CONTINUUM • NEW YORK

BEGINNING

PHILOSOPHY

2001

The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017

The Continuum International Publishing Group LtdThe Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

Original German edition, Der Anfang der Philosophie © 1996Philipp Reclam jun. GmbH & Co. Stuttgart

English translation copyright © 1998by The Continuum Publishing Company

All rights reserved.No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the

written permission of The Continuum Publishing Company.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gadamer, Hans Georg, 1900-[Anfang der Philosophie. English]The beginning of philosophy / Hans-Georg Gadamer.

p. cm.ISBN 0-8264-1225-4 (pbk.)1. Pre-Socratic philosophers. I. Title.

B187.5.G3313 2000182-<lc21 98-34594

CIP

ContentsTranslator's Preface 7

1. The Meaning of Beginning 9

2. Hermeneutic Access to the Beginning 19

3. Solid Ground: Plato and Aristotle 33

4. Life and Soul: The Pbaedo 41

5. The Soul between Nature and Spirit 50

6. From the Soul to the Logos:The Theatetusand the Sophist 60

7. Aristotle's Doxographical Approach 71

8. Ionic Thinking in Aristotle's Physics 83

9. Parmenides and the Opinions of the Mortals 94

10. Parmenides and Being 107

Index 126

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Translator's PrefaceCC TTie crucial thing in my lectures on the Presocratics is that I

A begin neither with Thales nor with Homer nor do I beginwith the Greek language in the second century before Christ; Ibegin instead with Plato and Aristotle. This, in my judgment, is diesole philosophical access to an interpretation of die Presocratics.Everything else is historicism without philosophy." With theseunequivocal words, Hans-Georg Gadamer initiates a philosophicaland philological exploration in which he peels away the palimpses-tic layers of interpretation and misinterpretation that have built upover twenty-five hundred years of scholarship on the Presocraticphilosophers. Moving easily from such ancient interpreters as Sim-plicius and Diogenes Laertius to the nineteenth-century Germanhistoricists and then to Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Gadamerpresents us here with his only book-length work on philosophybefore Plato and Aristotle and one of only a few extended treat-ments of the Presocratics in his entire corpus. I am not sure whetherit is ironic or just oddly coincidental, however, that a book offeringsuch a thorough critique of textual reproduction, reception, andinterpretation should have its own peculiar doxographical history.

The lectures presented here go back to one of Gadamer's lastlecture courses on the topic of Presocratic philosophy, which heconducted toward the end of 1967, shortly before retiring from fulltime teaching to become Professor Emeritus at the University ofHeidelberg. Some twenty years later, in 1988, he was asked by theInstitute per gli Studi Filosofici to deliver another series of talks onthe beginnings of philosophy, which he did without a manuscriptand in what Gadamer himself refers to as "quite inelegant Italian."Vittorio DeCesare then transcribed a set of audiotapes of these lec-tures, smoothed out the Italian prose, and had them published in1993 under the tide, Uinizio della filosofia occidentale. The Reclampublishing house then asked Gadamer to prepare a German editionof the book based on a translation from the Italian by Joachim

8 Translator's Preface

Schulte. This present translation into English is based on Gadamer'sdefinitive revision of Schulte's translation, which Reclam publishedin 1996 under the tide, Der Anfang der Philosophic.

As the translator of these lectures into English, therefore, Iwas presented with the text of a series of talks based ultimatelyon a German lecture course; these talks, however, were deliveredin Italian, then transcribed and revised for publication in Italy,then translated back into German and revised by the authorbefore being published in Germany. As one might imagine, sucha convoluted textual history could introduce certain difficultiesfor producing an "accurate" and readable English version. And,in fact, while the German edition is highly readable, I did have tocontend with a few minor errors (mostly of a bibliographicalnature) and a number of rhetorical inconsistencies, some of whichseem to be traceable to the original transcription from audiotape.

Through the helpful mediation of Richard Palmer, who hap-pened to be in Heidelberg during the final editing process, all ofmy bibliographical corrections have been verified by Gadamerhimself. Also, any substantial departures from the rhetoricalstructure of the German have been footnoted and explained. In anumber of instances, however, without noting it, I have adjustedthe punctuation of the German text to clarily Gadamer's owntranslations of Greek words and phrases and render them moreconsistent throughout. I have also transliterated the Greek so asto make it somewhat more readable, but scholars of the languagemay note an intentional inconsistency in my transliteration. Forpurely visual reasons, I have consistently written the Greekupsilon as a Roman "u" except in certain standard philosophicalterms such as "pbysis" "hyle," and "hypokeimenon," all ofwhich are traditionally written with the Roman "y.w

While I alone assume all responsibility for any errors or awk-wardness in this translation, I would like to acknowledge twopeople in particular for the invaluable assistance. In addition toRichard Palmer, who, aside from relaying questions and answersto and from Professor Gadamer for me, was kind enough to readand comment on every line of my translation, I want to thankSigrid Koepke for her close reading of my original draft and herhelp in ironing out some of the more subtle idiomatic difficultiesof the German text. I would also like to thank Charles Bambachof the University of Texas at Dallas for his helpful suggestions onvarious linguistic and philosophical problems.

1The Meaning of Beginning

E order to present the theme dealt with here, a theme thatas always held a very particular fascination for me, I fall

back on the notes from my last Heidelberg lecture-course,which I offered toward the end of the year 1967. Ever sincethen, in fact, I have thought that it might be worthwhile totake up the thread of that lecture-course once again.

The theme is the beginning of Greek philosophy, whichalso represents the beginning of Western culture.1 This themeis not merely of historical interest. It touches on current prob-lems of our own culture, which finds itself not only in a phaseof radical change but also one of uncertainty and a lack ofself-assurance. We therefore strive to establish connections toaltogether different kinds of cultures, cultures that, unlike ourown, did not originate in Greek culture. This is one reason forour interest in the first stages of the development of Greekthinking. Such an examination of the Presocratics does haverelevance for us. It deepens our understanding of our owndestiny, a destiny which begins, as do Greek philosophy andscience, precisely in those years in which Greece's hegemonyin the Mediterranean world, both on the sea and in trade,begins to take hold. A rapid cultural development followsimmediately thereafter. It is no accident that the first Preso-cratics came from Asia Minor, from the coastal area aroundMiletus and Ephesus, thus from the same region that

1. Kultur

10 The Beginning of Philosophy

dominated the trade and culture of the entire Mediterranean areaat the time.

This, then, is the theme I propose to address, though obvi-ously only within certain limits and without any claim to exhaustit. For an undertaking of this kind never ends by arriving at a pre-determined destination, as you can surely see from the fact Imyself am coming back to the same topic once again after somany years in order to pose numerous new questions that havearisen and to pose them in a newly thought out and (I hope)improved form.

At this point, I think it is necessary to begin with an intro-ductory methodological consideration that will, in a certainsense, serve to justify my approach: the crucial thing in my lec-tures on the Presocradcs is that I begin neither with Thales norwith Homer, nor do I begin with the Greek language in the sec-ond century before Christ; I begin instead with Plato and Aristo-tle. This, in my judgment, is the sole philosophical access to aninterpretation of the Presocratics. Everything else is historicismwithout philosophy.

This preliminary assertion does require substantiation. As weknow, it was the Romantics who first set themselves the task ofresearching and offering an interpretation of the Presocratics thatcomes out of the Romantic preoccupation with original texts. Ineighteenth-century European universities, it was not yet the ruleto study a Platonic text or any other philosophical text in theoriginal. One used handbooks. As the study of original texts gotunderway, it signaled a change of attitude that was due to thegreat universities of Paris and Gottingen as well as other Euro-pean schools in which the great humanistic tradition survived—just as it did, of course, first and foremost in the English collegesand universities.

The German teachers of philosophy who first opened thegates to philosophical investigation and interpretation of thePresocratics were Hegel and Schleiermacher. The significant rolethat Hegel played in this respect—not only with his Lectures onthe History of Philosophy, which were published by Hegel'sfriends after his death—is well known. (This is really quite aninadequate edition, which, of course, doggedly persists in thefield of Hegelian thought; but the posthumous works have notbeen edited with the diligence that a thinker of such magnitudedeserves.) Besides this, there are still other things in Hegel's

The Meaning of Beginning 11

works that demonstrate far more impressively how importantPresocratic philosophy was for Hegel's thinking. Take, forexample, the beginning of the Science of Logic, a "systematic"work that proposes to interpolate itself by dialectal means intothe framework of Kant's extensive program of transcendentallogic. It is extremely interesting to compare this beginning withthe early manuscripts in which Hegel deals with the system ofKantian categories, to see how these concepts unfold step bystep from out of one another toward the goal of the dialecticaltransition to the Idea. In Hegel's early writings from the Jenaperiod, the best-known chapter of the Logic is missing—pre-cisely the whole first chapter about being, nothing, and becom-ing. Hegel added this chapter later, and in it he undertook some-thing nearly incomprehensible—that is, to introduce threebeginning categories (namely, being, nothing, and becoming)that lie prior even to all logos, thereby preceding even the formof the proposition. Hegel begins with these mysteriously simpleconcepts that cannot be determined propositionally but are nev-ertheless foundational. Herein lies the beginning of Hegel'sdialectical thinking—a beginning that is carried out by way ofthe Presocratics. In that other great work of Hegelian philoso-phy, the Phenomenology of Spirit, we find the same thing: thefirst chapters can be read as a single commentary on none otherthan the chapter in the history of philosophy devoted to the Pre-socratics, which Hegel himself was lecturing on at the time. Itseems obvious to me that Hegel allowed himself to be guided bythis first stretch of the philosophical road in formulating thearchitecture of his dialectical method of thinking. We can there-fore conclude not only that the historical research into classicalphilosophy begins with Hegel in the nineteenth century, but thatan ever-newly initiated and never-ending philosophical dialoguewith the Presocratics begins here as well.

The other great scholar and thinker was Friedrich Schleierma-cher, the celebrated theologian and translator of Plato's works intoGerman. In the context of translated literature from every culture,Schleiermacher's achievement stands out as a true paradigm. Itconstitutes a prelude to a new cooperation between humanists,such as philologists, on the one hand, and theoreticians, such asphilosophers, on the other. Recently, the rediscovery of the indi-rect tradition of the Platonic doctrine by the Tubingen school ofKonrad Gaiser and Hans-Joachim Kramer (following Leon


Robin) has, as you know, led to the coining of the new expres-sion, "Schleiermacherianism." This expression sounds awful inGerman, and I think it entirely misses the mark in terms of con-tent. In my opinion, Schleiermacher deserves the credit for allow-ing Plato to be studied again not only as a writer but also as adialectical and speculative thinker.

In contrast to Hegel, Schleiermacher had a particular feelingfor the individuality of phenomena. The discovery of the individ-ual was indeed, at that time, the great achievement of romanticculture. The famous catch-phrase, that the individual is "ineffa-bile" and thus there is no possibility of conceptually grasping theindividual's singularity, emerges in the Romantic period. Admit-tedly, this phrase does not have a written tradition behind it; butthe gist of it shows up already in the early stages of Platonic andAristotelian metaphysics where the differentiating of the logosfinds it limits in an indivisible eidos.

In Schleiermacher, one finds an extraordinarily flexible dialec-tical and speculative thinking combined with impressive classicaland humanistic erudition. As a theologian he wrote, in additionto his main works, a succession of essays aimed at putting to restthe superficial and unwarranted equation of Greek philosophyand Christianity. It is thanks to him that the trail was blazed forthe study of the Presocratics. One of his students, ChristianAugust Brandis, wrote a great work on the philosophy of theGreeks2 and inspired the Berlin historical school from then all theway up through Eduard Zeller.

Now I would like to interrupt these deliberations on the verybeginnings of Presocratic historiography to pose a question of atheoretical nature: What does it mean to say that Presocratic phi-losophy is the beginning, the principium, of Western thinking?What do we mean here by "principium"'? There are many and var-ious concepts of principium. It is clear, for example, that the Greekword, "arche," encompasses two senses of principium, namely,principium in the temporal sense of origin and beginning as wellas principium in the speculative, logical-philosophical sense. I willleave out of consideration for the moment the fact that, accordingto scholastic usage, "principium" also generally means "philoso-phy" in the sense of a doctrine of principles. Instead, I will occu-py myself with the many facets and horizons of the concept of

2. Handbuch der Ceschichte der Griechisch-romischen Philosophic


"principium" in the sense of "beginning."3 The German word"Anfang" has always presented difficulties for thinking. For exam-ple, there is the problem of the beginning of the world or thebeginning of language. The riddle of the beginning has many spec-ulative aspects, so it will be worthwhile getting to the bottom ofthe problems harbored within it.

In a certain sense, Aristotle had already seen the dialecticinherent in this concept. In the Physics (specifically, I believe, inthe fifth book), he argues that motion ends in rest, for at the endof motion there must be something that remains and stands therecompleted. But what is its beginning? When does the motionbegin? When does it end? When is it that what is living begins tobe dead? When does death set in? When something is dead, afterall, the moment of its beginning is no longer a concern. This issimilar to the riddle of time, which likewise did not go unnoticedin the framework of Aristotle's dialectic: time has no beginning;for the moment we posit as the very first inevitably causes us tothink of yet another, earlier moment. There is no escape from thisdialectic of the beginning.

What all of this means with regard to our theme is clear.When does the history of the Presocratics begin? With Thales, asAristotle tells us? This is one of the points we will deal with inour discussion. Yet, at the same time, we should also note herethat, in reference to the beginning, Aristotle also mentionedHomer and Hesiod, the first "theologizing" authors, and it maybe correct that the great epic tradition already represents a stepalong the path toward the rational explanation of life and theworld, a step that is then fully initiated by the Presocratics.

But besides these, there is yet another, far more obscure pre-cursor—something that lies prior to all written tradition, priorto epic literature as well as the Presocratics, namely, the lan-guage spoken by the Greeks. Language is one of the great riddlesof human history. How is language formed? I remember quitewell one day in Marburg, when I was still very young, how Hei-degger spoke of the moment in which man raised his head forthe first time and posed a question to himself. The moment inwhich something begins to occupy human understanding: whenwas that? This became a great bone of contention among us.Who was the first human to raise his head? Adam? Or Thales?

3. Anfang


If anything, all this strikes us today as laughable, and we were,in fact, still very young at the time. Nevertheless, perhaps thisdiscussion did point to something of real significance, somethingconnected with the great riddle of language. Language—accord-ing to an expression that no doubt stems from Nietzsche—is afabrication of God.

To come back to the Greek language: Greek in itself alreadyoffers speculative and philosophical possibilities of a particularkind. Here I wish to name only two. The first is well known asone of the most fruitful properties of the Greek language (which,by the way, it has in common with the German language), name-ly, the use of the neuter, which allows it to present the intention-al object of thought as the subject. Moreover, there are the stud-ies of Bruno Snell and Karl Reinhardt, those great teachers withwhom I had the good fortune to be closely associated. They havemade clear how the concept already announces itself in this useof the neuter. Indeed, something is indicated in the use of theneuter that is found neither here nor there and yet is common toall things. In Greek poetry, just as in German poetry, the neutersignifies something omnipresent, an atmospheric presence. It hasto do not with the quality of a being,4 but the quality of a wholespace, "being,"5 in which all beings appear.

The second distinguishing characteristic is obvious as well. Itis the existence of the copula, the use of the verb "to be** to linkthe subject and predicate, that constitutes the structure of the sen-tence. This is also a crucial point, but we need to bear in mindthat the copula does not yet have anything to do either withontology or with the conceptual analysis of being that begins withPlato, or perhaps with Parmenides, and never comes to a defini-tive conclusion in the Western metaphysical tradition.

It occurs to me here that I forgot to mention a question that,in my opinion, we do not entertain often enough but which hasclaimed my attention for a long time. It is the question of theGreeks' adoption of the alphabet. In comparison to other kindsof writing—say, those which use ideograms or pictograms—thealphabet is a prodigious feat of abstraction. The Greeks, ofcourse, did not invent alphabetic script, but they did appropriate

4. eines Seienden. Unless noted otherwise, "das Seiende" will be ren-dered as "that which is," "what is," oii occasionally, "beings," depending onthe context, while the word "being" will be reserved for "das Sein.*

5. das Sein


it, and—by introducing vowels into the Semitic alphabet—theyperfected it. This appropriation took two hundred years at themost. Homer, for example, is unthinkable without the generalintroduction of alphabetic writing.

All of this goes to show how complicated things are withregard to the meaning of "principium" in the sense of that whichcomes first As we see, with this sense of beginning an entire seriesof alternatives is brought into view: Thales, epic literature, theriddle of the Greek language, and writing.

I think it necessary at this point to adhere precisely to thefact that something is only ever a beginning in relation to an endor a goal. Between these two, beginning and end, stands an indis-soluble connection. The beginning always implies the end. When-ever we fail to mention what the beginning in question refers to,we say something meaningless. The end determines the begin-ning, and this is why we get into a long series of difficulties. Theanticipation of the end is a prerequisite for the concrete meaningof beginning.

We are dealing here with the beginning of philosophy. But whatactually is philosophy? Plato furnished the word "philosophy"with a somewhat artificial and decidedly unconventional emphasis;for him, philosophy was the sheer striving after wisdom or truth.For Plato, philosophy was not the possession of knowledge butonly the striving for knowledge. This did not correspond to the cus-tomary usage of the terms "philosophy** and "philosopher.** Theword "philosopher" usually referred to a person who was entirelyengrossed in theoretical contemplation, hence someone likeAnaxagoras, who reportedly answered the question of happinessby saying that it consisted in observing the stars. Whatever else itmight have been, as striving after wisdom and as possession of wis-dom, philosophy had at its disposal a domain far broader than theone we ascribe to it today as a combination of the Enlightenment,Platonism, and historicism. In its present sense, there is essentiallyno philosophy at all without modern science. In its highest mean-ing, philosophy is considered the supreme science; nevertheless, inthe end, we must admit that philosophy, for its part, is not really ascience in the same sense as die others.

Beginning and end are thus bound up with one another andcannot be separated. From where something shows itself to bea beginning and what direction it will take both depend uponthe goal.


In this relationship between beginning and end we can alreadybegin to detect one of the main problems in the analysis of histori-cal life, namely, the concept of teleology or, to use a current expres-sion, development. This, as you know, is one of the best knownproblems of modern historicism. Nevertheless, the concept of devel-opment has absolutely nothing to do with history. Strictly speaking,development is the negation of history. Indeed, development meansthat everything is already given in the beginning—enveloped in itsbeginning. It follows from this that development is merely abecoming-visible, a maturing process, as it plays itself out in thebiological growth of plants and animals. This, however, means that"development" always carries a naturalistic connotation. In a cer-tain sense, therefore, discourse about an "historical development"harbors something of a contradiction. As soon as history is in play,what matters is not what is merely given, but, decisively, what isnew. Insofar as nothing new, no innovation, and nothing unforseenis present, there is also no history to relate. Destiny also means con-stant unpredictability. The concept of development, therefore,brings to expression the fundamental difference that exists betweenthe process-quality of nature and the fluctuating accidents and inci-dents of human life. What comes to expression here is a primordialopposition between nature and spirit.

How, then, are we to understand my thesis, according towhich the beginning depends upon the goal? Perhaps in the sensethat the end of metaphysics is taken to be this goal? This was thenineteenth-century answer. In a masterfully written chapter of hisbook, Introduction to the Human Sciences, Wilhelm Dilthey, oneof the followers of Schleiermacher and his school, depicted thebeginning of metaphysics from the viewpoint of its collapse. ForDilthey, the nineteenth century is the period in which metaphysicsloses its authority to the positivism of the sciences. In this sense,it is therefore possible to speak of the end of metaphysics and,consequently, also of its beginning in the way that Aristotle doesin the first book of the Metaphysics, where he refers to Thales asthe first person to have relied upon experience and evidence forhis explanations rather than just retelling the divine myths.

Another concept of the end, one that is connected with theabove, is the one according to which scientific rationality or sci-entific culture forms the goal. In this case, we are dealing withnearly the same thing, albeit from a different perspective. While,in the first case, metaphysics comes to a conclusion in the


nineteenth century after a two-thousand-year ripening process,in the second case, scientific rationality—and metaphysics alongwith it—is seen as determining the goal of humanity in general.In this regard, one could cite the slogan, "From Mythos toLogos," a phrase that seeks to capture the entire history of thePresocratics in one comprehensive formulation. Still more wide-ly known is the concept coined by Max Weber, die Entzauberungder Welt,6 or even the Heideggerian concept of the forgetfulnessof being. As we are gradually realizing today, however, it is per-haps not so entirely obvious that the end of metaphysics is thegoal toward which the path of Western thinking was headedfrom the beginning.

Furthermore, there is a third and more radical conception ofthe goal: the end of man. This is an idea that we know of not justfrom Foucault, but also because it is put forward by many otherauthors. It seems to me that this is not a perspective from whichwe can derive a satisfactory definition of the concept of beginning.For in this case, the determination of the end is just as impreciseand as nebulous as the beginning.

But there is yet a further meaning of "beginning,** and, for ourpurposes, it seems to me that this one is the most productive andthe most suitable. This meaning is brought out when I speak not ofthat which is incipient but of incipience.7 Being incipient8 refers tosomething that is not yet determined in this or that sense, not yetdetermined in the direction of this or that end, and not yet deter-mined appropriate for this or that representation. This means thatmany eventualities—within reason, of course—are still possible.Perhaps the true sense of "beginning" is nothing more than this:that one knows the beginning of a thing means that one knows itin its youth—by this I mean that stage in the life of a human beingin which concrete and definite developmental steps have not yetbeen taken. The young person starts out in uncertainty but at thesame time feels excited by the possibilities that lie ahead. (Todaythis fundamental experience of being young is threatened by theexcessive organization of our lives—so much so that, in the end, theyoung no longer know or scarcely know the feeling of launchinginto fife, of the ongoing determination of their lives from out oftheir own lived experience.) This analogy suggests a movement that

6. Literally, the "de-magification" of the world.7. nicht votn Anfangenden, sondern von Anfanglichkeit8. Anfanglichsein


is open at first and not yet fixed but which concretizes itself into aparticular orientation with ever-increasing determinateness.

This, I believe, is the sense in which we must speak of thebeginning that commences with the Presocratics. In them there isa seeking without knowledge of the ultimate destiny, the goal ofan emanation rich in possibilities. It comes as a surprise when wediscover that the most important dimension of human thinkingopens itself up in this beginning. This discovery corresponds in away to Hegel's intuitive insight when he begins his Logic with theriddle of the unity of being and nothing. He even refers to religionin this context in order to suggest that this is not simply an emptyword, not merely a perspective that loses itself in indeterminacy,but is determined by the fact that it is potentiality—or rather vir-tuality, as I like to say, for potentiality is always the possibility ofa determinately real actuality, whereas virtuality is open in thesense of an orientation toward an indeterminate future.

Finally, I want to point out that the beginning is not some-thing reflected but rather something immediate. The discourse of"principium" is, to my mind, much too reflexive to indicatesomething that is not yet a stage upon the path of reflection, butis rather—as I have tried to suggest through the analogy with theyouth—open to concrete experience.

2Hermeneutic Access

to the Beginning'Throughout my remarks, it is essential to bear in mind the roleJ. that Hegelian logic plays as the reference point for the writing

of the history of philosophy in the nineteenth century. Significantnames such as Eduard Zeller or Wilhelm Dilthey are closely tied tothe tradition of Hegelian logic. When it comes to discussing the ini-tial categories of Hegel's logic, I, for one, disagree with the claimthat it is all about being and non-being. For nothing is not non-being but precisely nothing.1 A fundamental point of my argumentasserts that the first three categories are, at bottom, not categoriesat all because they are not predicated of anything. On the contrary,they are like simple orientation points, and this is extremely impor-tant if we are to grasp that our understanding of the beginning thatemanates from the end is never definitive. It is not the last wordsimply because even the movement of reflection has its place with-in the context of a beginningless and endless tradition.2

Admittedly, Hegel insists that this is not a question of themovement of self-consciousness but of the movement of ideas.Still, to assume that ideas and the thinking of them form separatepoles is truly a superficial way of looking at things. Indeed,Hegelian logic is an entirely Greek logic insofar as Greek philoso-phy knows only ideas and knows nothing of self-consciousness.The concept of nous is but an early manifestation of reflexivity as

1. Denn das Nichts ist kein Nichtsein, sondern eben das Nichts.2. Tradition


such, and this reflexivity does not yet have the character of mod-ern Cartesian subjectivity. This, of course, only defers the problem.In the end—in absolute knowing—the difference between the Ideaand its movement is superseded3 and the movement is unques-tionably the movement of thinking, which we, nevertheless, viewas something like the projection of the ideas upon a wall.

By way of elucidation, I would just like to add that the threemeanings of "beginning" that I spoke of [in chapter 1] cannot beseparated from each other. They must be understood as three sidesof one and the same thing. These are the historical-temporal mean-ing, the reflexive meaning with respect to the beginning and theend, and the one meaning that suggests perhaps the most likely andthe most authentic idea of the beginning, namely, that of the begin-ning that does not know in advance in what way it will proceed. Iput this three-part division forward to serve as my premise foropening up the Presocratics philosophically. In any case, accordingto this premise, the beginning is not given to us directly; rather, it isnecessary to proceed back to it from another point. In this way Iavoid completely excluding the reflexive relationship betweenbeginning and end, which would, after all, be a question of apply-ing a concept that I myself proposed, a concept that would therebycarry over into the realm of the history of philosophy and its originin Greek culture. As I have already emphasized, the interest in thePresocratic tradition arises with Romanticism, and Hegel, likeSchleiermacher, affirms the significance of temporal movement andof history for the development of the content of Spirit. Here wecould recall Hegel's famous assertion that the essence of Spirit liesin the fact that its appearance occurs in time, in history.

The object here is not to go through the entire developmentof European scholarship in the nineteenth century. I have alreadygiven an overview of the great nineteenth-century interpreters ofthe Presocratics in an article published only in Italian.4 Here, Iwould like to recall just two figures who are representative ofboth historical interpretation and the debate over the principlesand methods of Problemgeschichte5 that raged within the

3. aufgehoben: canceled and preserved at the same time.4. "I Presocratici," in volume 3 of Questioni di storiografia filosofica

(edited by Vittorio Mathieu, Brescia: Editrice La Scuola, 1975), 13-114.5. Literally, "problem history," the term signifies a technique of inter-

preting history in terms of the problems that one discerns within it. Unfor-tunately, there is no elegant way to render this term in English,

Hermeneutic Access to the Beginning 21

framework of German culture at the end of the nineteenth centu-ry and the beginning of the twentieth. In addition to theseremarks, I will then comment on what I call "effectivehistory"6—an expression affiliated with hermeneutics—whichplays a central role in the whole of philosophy that is foundedupon language, understanding, and interpretation.

First of all, I would like to recall Eduard Zeller and the greatwork he devoted to the philosophy of the Greeks. This work isalso well known in Italy, and indeed for good reason. The five vol-umes of the last Italian edition are a treasure trove of scholarlyknowledge and expertise. It is to their credit that Rodolfo Mon-dolfo and his followers have enlarged and edited the Italian edi-tion by taking account of scholarly advances in the field of theancient philosophy. Mondolfo, with his erudition and good judg-ment, has succeeded in renewing Zeller's classic opus and keepingit up to date.

Turning back now to Zeller's work itself, the question arises asto what really sets it apart. Eduard Zeller was originally a theolo-gian; his interests, however, led him into the history of philosophyand historical research. Thus he made numerous contributionsalong the lines of German historicism. His conceptual basis is amoderate Hegelianism. This led him to detect a certain meaning inthe development of philosophical thinking—and especially Greekthinking. He sees a meaning in it, but not one commensurate withHegel's conception of the necessity of development. Besides, evenif we admit that a complete parallelism between the logical devel-opment of the ideas and its progress in the history of philosophycannot be accepted unreservedly, interpreting the philosophicaltradition by means of the Hegelian schema is by now a fixture ofour way of thinking. In any case, this constitutes Zeller's moder-ate Hegelianism, and I would now like to offer an example to illus-trate how it becomes operative:

As you know, the relationship between Parmenides and Hera-clitus is a controversial one. One side tells us that Parmenides crit-icizes Heraclitus, another side claims that Heraclitus is a critic ofParmenides, and yet another side says that there is probably nohistorical relationship here at all. Maybe the truth is that neitherof the two knew anything of the other. It would not be at allunlikely that they had no connection to each other whatsoever—

6. Wirkungsgeschichte


at least not during their respective periods of creative activity—since, after all, the one lived in Ephesus, the other in Elea. Why hasthis diesis of mine caused such a stir? The answer is clear: to thisday, Hegel has a hand in everything! Even the historian finds itplausible that all things are bound together in the progressivedevelopment of knowledge! This historical way of thinking, whicharises in the nineteenth century and still appears plausible to ustoday, seems to me a convincing example of the living Hegelianlegacy, a legacy that is certainly present in Zeller as well. We mustalways bear this legacy in mind if we are to see Zeller's limitationswhen it comes to textual interpretation.

Just as the specter of Hegel looms behind the figure of Zeller,so Schleiermacher, the other reference point for nineteenth-century Presocratic historiography, comes into view behind Wil-helm Dilthey. In a country like Italy where historicism has deeproots, Dilthey is well-known. Here, I would just like to recallvery concisely what, to my mind, is fundamental to Dilthey,namely, the concept of structure, which, of course, is used herein its comprehensive sense and not in the specialized meaning ofcontemporary structuralism. Dilthey's introduction of this con-cept into the philosophical discussion is a remarkable accom-plishment. It marks the first resistance on the side of the humansciences7 to the incursion of natural-scientific methodology. In atime when epistemology occupied a dominant position, Diltheydared to take a stand against the prevailing tendency to positinductive logic and the principle of causality as the only modelsfor explaining facts.

In this context, "structure" means that there is yet anotherway of understanding truth besides inquiring into causes. Struc-ture denotes a connectedness among parts in which no one partis thought of as having priority. This accords with the teleologi-cal judgment of Kant's Third Critique, where something obviousis soundly demonstrated, namely, that in a living organism nopart occupies the first position and has to fulfill the sole executivefunction while the others are all secondary. On the contrary, allthe parts of the organism are unified, and they all serve it.Although the expression "structure," as such, comes from archi-tecture and the natural sciences, Dilthey's understanding of theword is largely metaphorical. Structure does not mean that there

7. Wissenschaften vom Menschen


is first a cause and then an effect; rather, it has to do with aninterplay of effects.

Accordingly, Dilthey brings into play another concept whichhas been of great importance to me, namely, the "matrix ofeffects,"8 a concept that does not focus on differentiating betweencause and effect but on the connection that each and every effecthas relative to the others. The same holds true for the work of artas is does for the living organism. Dilthey's favorite example is thestructure of a melody. A melody is not a mere sequence of tones.A melody has a conclusion, and it finds its fulfillment in this con-clusion. A feature which the knowledgeable listener distinguish-es—and, in particular, the listener of difficult music—is, as youknow, an occurrence that stands out from the rest, the moment inwhich the composition comes to an end and immediately, becausethe work has fulfilled itself in the conclusion, the applausesounds. Like an organism, the artwork forms a well-structuredmatrix of effects, and thus, as long as we remain in the realm ofthe aesthetic, there can obviously be no question of the artworkhaving a causal explanation; rather, its explanation must be basedon such concepts as harmony and interaction, thus it must bebased on structure. With this way of looking at things, Diltheywants to justify the originality and the autonomy of the humansciences.9 There is indeed in the human sciences a kind of evi-dentness of structural connections and a mode of understandingthem that is completely different from the procedures by whichthe natural sciences work (the natural sciences at that time beingunderstood in mechanistic terms).

Now the question arises of how far we can carry this way oflooking at things in terms of structural connections into the realmof Presocratic philosophy. Where is there a pristine work here?Where is there a text in the realm of Presocratic philosophy that iscomplete enough to present itself in a way that shows its internalconnections? We know nothing more than fragments and quota-tions by later authors, often mere allusions and distortions, in short:a tradition so tenuous that to apply the "principle of structure"adapted from aesthetic experience would seem extremely forced.

We can add to this difficulty an observation of a more gener-al character that has great significance for me: We never find

8. Wirkungszusammenhang9. Geisteswissenscbaften


ourselves in the situation of being pure observers of or listeners toan artwork because in a certain sense we are always involved inour tradition. Comprehending the objectives, the inner structure,and the context of a work is not in itself sufficient to clear awayall our prejudices that arise from the fact that we ourselves standwithin a tradition.

The most convincing example, one that vividly illustrates thisproblem, is found in Dilthey's Introduction to the Human Sci-ences. In the second part of this book, Dilthey describes the ori-gin, the development, and the decline of scientific metaphysics. Itis surprising how Dilthey portrays the venture that the Greekshad undertaken—a hopeless one in his view—as they tried to con-ceptualize the images of religious, speculative, poetic, and mytho-logical intuition scientifically. For him, a scientific metaphysics isin itself something of a contradiction. For it is the desire toexpress the depths of life scientifically in spite of their being inac-cessible to science. This state of affairs is wonderfully exemplifiedby Dilthey's interpretation of Democritus. Democritus is the lastimportant thinker of his epoch. He has continually been deniedthe recognition he deserved because the entire history of human-ity has been dominated by a metaphysics based on the thinking ofPlato and Aristotle. In Hellenism this perspective admittedlydeclined in significance, but the classical tradition of metaphysicspersisted through the entire period and came to predominanceonce again in the Middle Ages. Only in modern times, only in thewake of natural-scientific development, do Democritus and atom-ism find new supporters (and today there are authors who, likePopper, glimpse in Aristotle an antiquated dogmatism and inPlato a completely misguided ideology of the same stamp asNational Socialism).

The point that I want to establish here is clear: even such a dis-ciplined thinker as Dilthey, a thinker who represents an historicalmode of thinking entirely his own, ultimately clings to a kind ofmodernistic perspective that is entirely alienated from history.

I am therefore persuaded that even historicism, which recog-nizes the individuality of each structure, is not free from theprejudices of its epoch, prejudices that continue to exert an influ-ence on the disciples of this Dcmocritan perspective. Nowadays,of course, it would not be easy to imagine anyone in the third cen-tury before Christ who would have thought a Galileo possible.Despite the great achievements of Euclid and Archimedes,


mathematics at that time was still not well enough developed forthis, and there are many other historical arguments that precludethis view of things.

There is, however, yet another way to approach an object ofscholarship, and we call this "Problemgeschichte."10 A new prin-ciple gained acceptance toward the end of the nineteenth century:In philosophy there is no systematic truth, no universally validsystem. Every system is one-sided; it is not the truth as such butonly a more or less partial view of the truth. Nevertheless, thesame problems underlie the formation of the different systems,and to this extent it is possible to speak of a history of philoso-phy and even of a philosophy of the Presocratics. HermannCohen, for example, interprets Parmenides as the discoverer ofidentity, Heraclitus as the discoverer of difference, etc. Even herewe can detect a Hegelian foundation, a foundation of which thehistorians of philosophy are seldom adequately aware. Hegelianlogic is like a huge quarry from which all later history of philos-ophy takes its building materials.

But what is a problem, really? The term comes from the lan-guage of competitors who line up against each other and attemptto throw obstacles in each other's way. From here, the expressionis transferred figuratively to debate: an argument posed againstthe perspective of the other participants in a conversation is likean obstacle. In this sense, a problem is something that impedesthe progress of knowledge. Aristotle has formulated this conceptof the problem quite aptly in the Topics.

This gives us an opportunity to point out the differencebetween science and philosophy. In science, the problem is some-thing that demands that we not be satisfied with hitherto accept-ed explanations but continue on and seek out new experiencesand new theories. This is why the emergence of a problem in sci-ence is, as Popper says, the first step along the road of progress.But where this problem comes from is another matter, which Pop-per would perhaps dismiss as a psychological question. To pre-cisely test and verify the consequences of a theory is not the soledecisive point for scientific knowledge. On the contrary, as a rule,the hallmark of the true researcher is the discovery of new ques-tions. This is the most important legacy of the researcher: theimagination—for the main thing is to find a fruitful way of

10. See note 5 above.


putting the question. This—and not verification or falsification,as dogmatic Popperianism would have it—is the crucial elementfor scientific creativity. Of course, Popper is correct when he saysthat the sciences have the task of solving the questions they posefor themselves. But the task of posing the right question is no lessimportant. And one must also admit that there are problems thatlie beyond the realm of scientific possibility.

We can see from this how philosophy is different. Even if thephilosopher realizes that the solution to such problems is ruledout, the problems are nevertheless not inconsequential because ofthis. It is therefore not correct to say that if a problem admits ofno falsification then it presents no question for the thinker. Thisis exactly why it is in the Topics, hence within the context of thetheory of the dialectic, that we find Aristotle's theory of the prob-lem, which, of course, is not to be understood in Hegel's sense butin exactly the opposite sense of a movement of thinking that doesnot claim to solve problems completely and thus remains in theneighborhood of rhetoric.

The rigidity and intractability of the problem is eliminated inthis version of the concept. Whoever would look for stable prob-lems in the instability of historical life would obviously have tomaintain that the same problems recur again and again. Let ustake the problem of freedom as an example. But which freedomare we dealing with here? Freedom as eleutberia in the historico-political sense of independence and sovereignty? In that case,being free means nothing more than not being a slave. This free-dom is certainly not the same as that preached by Stoic moraldoctrine, according to whose dicta the highest condition of free-dom consists in not desiring things which we cannot have. Thistoo is freedom, and indeed it is well-known that Stoic philosophyproposes the thesis that one who is wise is free even if he is inchains. Or what about the freedom of Christian doctrine, thefreedom of choice that Luther discusses in De servo arbitriot Fur-thermore, there is the freedom thematized in the framework ofthe dispute between determinism and indeterminism. This debateunfolded throughout the nineteenth century, and the discussioncontinues into the twentieth. But in this case the concept of free-dom is not defined in opposition to the dominance of a ruler whohas at his disposal the lives and the actions of subjects, but ratherin terms of nature and its necessary causality. Over against thisthe question arises as to whether freedom exists at all. I still


remember when the physicists of the Copenhagen school createdquantum theory. This was then brought forward by many rep-utable scientists as the solution to the problem of freedom. Thisseems almost ludicrous to us because we have not forgotten theKantian distinction between causality as a category that appliesto the facts11 that the natural sciences deal with, and morality,which is not a fact12 in the same sense as the set of facts13 exam-ined by physics, but rather a "fact"14 of reason. Freedom is a"fact of reason."15 This formulation, which Kant himselfemployed, may cause confusion. Opposite concepts are broughttogether in it, namely, the truth of facts16 and the truth of rea-son,17 to put it in Leibnizian terms. But what about Kant's asser-tion that freedom is a necessary condition for the human being tobe a moral and social person? Evidently, this concept of freedomis fundamentally different from the one that seems to be suggest-ed by the non-determinacy of phenomena but which, for that veryreason, cannot use as its basis the freedom of humanity.

A further characteristic example of the error one commitswhen one attempts at all costs to find the same problem in his-torically diverse concepts can be drawn from the realm of valueethics. In the nineteenth century, the concept of value taken overfrom political economics was, as we know, also carried over intoto philosophical theory. This concept, which Lotze used, came tobe applied by Max Scheler and in even larger measure by NicolaiHartmann, who was one of my first teachers and a fatherlyfriend. Hartmann interpreted the Aristotelian virtues as values,yet this interpretation is obviously inadequate. "Value" has anobjectifying meaning. Value has its own validity; it is independentof any evaluating; thus it is knowledge. In Aristotle, on the otherhand, virtue comes from education.18 Aristotelian virtue charac-terizes the human being as the person among people, not just inthe sense of correctly recognizing values that are valid in them-selves, but in the sense that the human being exists and comports

11. Tatsachen12. Faktum13. Tatbestdnde14. Tatsache15. ein Faktum der Vernunft16. Tatsacbenwahrheit17. Vernunftwahrheit18. Erziehung


him- or herself through education,19 habit, and character. In thisrespect, Aristotelian virtue is fundamentally different from theconcept of value found in phenomenology. This is one of thosecases where the lack of historical differentiation is patent, and forthis reason everything gets reduced to one and the same problem.Let us not forget, by the way, that Scheler, too, raised objectionsagainst Hartmann's equating values with Aristotelian virtues.

How do I now define my own procedure and my interpreta-tions in relation to Dilthey and problem history? I refer here to"effective history" and of "historically effective consciousness."This means, above all, that it is not correct to assert that the studyof a text or a tradition is completely dependent upon our owndecision making. Such a freedom, such a standing at a distancefrom the examined object simply does not exist. We all stand inthe life-stream of tradition and do not have the sovereign distancethat the natural sciences maintain in order to conduct experi-ments and to construct theories. It is certainly true that in mod-ern science—for example in quantum mechanics—the measuringsubject plays a different role from that of the purely objectifyingobserver. This, however, is something completely different fromstanding in the stream of tradition, being conditioned, and know-ing the other and his views, as such, on the basis of one's ownconditionality. This dialectic involves not only the cultural tradi-tion, i.e., philosophy, but also moral questions. Indeed this toohas nothing to do with the expert who "objectively" studies thenorms from the outside but rather with a person already imprint-ed with these norms: a person who finds himself already withinthe context of his society, his epoch, his nexus of prejudices, hisexperience of the world. All of this is already in effect and isdeterminative whenever we confront a particular perspective orinterpret a doctrine.

The concept of effect is ambiguous and is in certain respectsan attribute of history, but it is also in some sense an attribute ofconsciousness. Consciousness, without being conscious of it, isconditioned by historical determinations. We are not observerswho look at history from a distance; rather, insofar as we are his-torical creatures, we are always on the inside of the history thatwe are striving to comprehend. Herein lies the peculiarity of thiskind of consciousness—an irreducible peculiarity. For this reason

19. Bildung


it appears to me completely mistaken to assert that the distinctionbetween the natural sciences and human sciences is no longer asimportant as the nineteenth century believed. In fact, it wouldeven be anachronistic since the natural sciences, for their part, nolonger speak of a nature without development, without history.According to the natural sciences, since the human being has itsplace in the long history of the universe, it is fitting that the sci-ences of the moral and the spiritual domain also belong with thenatural sciences. This is completely wrong. It is an inappropriateinterpretation of the historicity of humanity. Human beings can-not be observed from the secure viewpoint of a researcher, and itis impossible to reduce them to the objects of evolution theoryand to understand them from that perspective. The experience ofhuman beings encountering themselves in history, this form ofdialogue, this way of coming to understand one another—all ofthis is fundamentally different from the study of nature and froman examination of the world and Homo sapiens based on a theo-ry of evolution. Those are exciting topics in their own right, butI hope it is now clear that when it comes to memory, this life ofthe mind,20 it is a different story altogether. Platonic anamnesis isreally is really quite similar to the riddle of language. They bothhave no principium, no beginning, and their terms cannot bederived from a principium as if there were an "ortho-language."The speaking of a language is a totality, a structure within whichwe have our place—a place which we have not chosen. Likewise,memory, which represents one way of articulating our experi-ences, is a process that may already be underway in utero. Ofcourse, I cannot be sure of this, for I have no recollection of myembryonic state. But that is not what is important. The importantthing is whether an experience is a recollecting, a re-perceiving, are-establishing.21

In the end, it seems clear that the hermeneutical situatednessof the human being is confirmed and that the pretense of stand-ing back from things as if they were nothing more than objectsof observation leaves out of account the crucial point of ourunderstanding other people (and other cultures). It is inevitablethat in our encounters with others those others speak to us aswell. Even the risky enterprise of interpreting the beginning of

20. Geist21. Wiederaufnahmen21. Wiederaufnahmen


Western thought must always be a dialogue between two part-ners in a conversation.

And with this even the meaning of the word "method" mustchange. Here there is no researcher in the privileged position ofan observing subject. In the sense established by Descartes, theword "method" presupposes that there is but a single methodwhich leads to truth. In the Discours de la method, but also inother writings, Descartes asserts emphatically that there is onlyone universal method for all possible objects of knowledge, andeven if we acknowledge that the method may be flexible in itsprocedures, this concept of method has ultimately gained theupper hand and dominated modern epistemology. In contrast tothis, the distinguishing characteristic of my own position in theframework of the philosophical work of our century is that Ionce again take up the well-known debate between the naturalsciences and the human sciences. If we overlook the fundamen-tal differences between their two standpoints, it seems to me thatthe debate between the logic of John Stuart Mill, on the onehand, and that of Wilhelm Dilthey, on the other, is based uponone and the same presupposition, upon the claim for the objec-tivity of method. Within this presupposition, everything isreduced to their contrasting methods of objectification. Buis precisely what is misleading here. "Methodos," in the ancientsense, always means the whole business of working with a cer-tain domain of questions and problems. "Method" in this senseis not a tool for objectifying and dominating something; rather,it is a matter of our participating in an association with thethings with which we are dealing. This meaning of "method" as"going along with"22 presupposes that we are already find our-selves in the middle of the game and can occupy no neutralstandpoint—even if we strive very hard for objectivity and putour prejudices at risk.

This claim, of course, sounds like a challenge to the naturalsciences and their ideal of objectivity. Yet the human sciencesoccupy themselves with other, quite different tasks. Of course,the question of the existence or non-existence of a set of factsand how to establish this also arises here. In the human sciences,this is an elementary and self-evident concern. What really mat-ters is the human being's encounter with himself in relation to an

22. Mitgehen


other different from himself. It is more of a "taking part" insomething,23 a participation that more closely resembles whattakes place, for example, in the believer who is faced with a reli-gious message than it does the relationship between subject andobject that plays itself out in the natural sciences. In any case,this hypothetical neutral standpoint would amount to the elimi-nation of the knowing subject, and, in fact, it goes without say-ing that the ultimate goal of the scientific rigor that one strivesfor here is to eliminate every subjective point of view. In cultur-al as well as in social life, however, this is inappropriate. This isnot the task of the human sciences. Here, the help of a methodwill not enable me to place myself in a determinate relationshipto an other who has been posited by me as an object. Jean-PaulSartre has aptly described what is disastrous about the objectify-ing gaze: in the instant that the other is reduced to an observedobject, the mutuality of the gaze is no longer maintained, and thecommunication ceases.

Discussion of the unity of the natural sciences and the humansciences is thus misleading as soon as it does not proceed from thefact that the functions of these two sciences are fundamentallydifferent. The former behaves in an objectifying way; the latterhas to do with participation. This certainly does not mean thatobjectification and methodical approach have no value in thehumanistic and historical disciplines, but only that they do notconstitute the meaning of scholarship in these fields. Otherwise,we could never explain our interest in the past. In fact, the nat-ural sciences themselves tell us that their concern is with achiev-ing advances in knowledge and, with these advances, achievingcontrol over nature and maybe even society. Culture, however,exists as a form of communication, as a game whose participantsare not subjects, on the one hand, and objects, on the other. Weshould understand, of course, that the cultural sciences do,indeed, have scientific methods available to them. But these areonly self-evident presuppositions in comparison with the valuethat our mutual participation in, our involvement in the traditionand the life of culture has for these sciences.

But I must now conclude this theme and turn to our specialtopic. The inadequacy of the concept of method in the sense ofguaranteeing objectivity becomes quite evident when I insist on

23. eine Teilnahme


the fact that our sole access to the topic of "the Presocratics" isPlato and Aristotle, whose texts, of course, are available for us tostudy and to see which questions they themselves have posed andin which sense. This is no easy undertaking, especially when itcomes to Plato. It can be carried out concretely only by readingthe texts in which Plato and Aristotle speak of their predecessors.And as we do this, we must not forget that in their work Platoand Aristotle did not have our historical scholarship in mind butwere guided by their own interests, by their own search for thetruth, a search that was common to these two authors but thatalso displayed different tendencies. At this point, therefore, a col-lective interpretation of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophycomes into play. For example: only when we have grasped the sig-nificance of the fact that in the context of Aristotle's critique Platois regarded as a Pythagorean can we make what Aristotle saysabout the Presocratics at all understandable.

3Solid Ground:

Plato and Aristotle"K Tow we must come to the main point. Our real theme is "The-L\l Presocratics and the Beginning of Western Thinking.** Inconnection with this theme, we will need to apply the principleswe have formulated up to now. The first really important ques-tion is which texts we can use for support. My response to thisis that the first true texts for our theme are the writings of Platoand Aristotle. There is, of course, the Diels collection of quota-tions, which we have had ever since Hermann Diels gathered thePresocratic fragments together. This is a solid and serviceablework that everyone will gratefully use for his or her initial stud-ies. It was designed for philosophy students. For scholarlyresearch, however, it is secondary when compared to the possi-bilities for understanding offered by a text that has been handeddown to us authentically and completely. As we know, the tech-nique of using quoted passages lends itself to any use whatsoev-er—even sometimes proving the opposite of what the originaltext says; for when it is torn out of its context, if we are notaware of this fact, even the most faithful and most exact quota-tion can mean something quite different than it did in the origi-nal. Whoever quotes already interprets by means of the form inwhich he or she presents the text of the quotation. All of thefragments compiled in the Presocratic collections are merelyquotations that have not come to us in finished and polishedtexts but via Plato and Aristotle, the Peripatetics, the Stoics, theSkeptics, the Church Fathers—a plethora of authors who cite


and describe these teachings for completely different purposes.Therefore, our first task consists in studying those texts in whichPresocratic thinking is interpreted in a coherent form. Only fromout of the context of these complete texts by Plato and Aristotlecan we even understand the pieces of text that Diels printed inhis supplements.

The single text that refers in its entirety to Presocratic think-ing is Simplicius' commentary on the first book of Aristotle'sPhysics. This is the oldest text on the teachings of the Presocrat-ics to be handed down to us. It goes back to a scholar of the sixthcentury after Christ who incorporated numerous citations intohis commentary on Aristotle's Physics. So we must, first of all, askourselves what this Aristotle commentator's selection criteriawere. We can hardly assume that the Presocratics from the sixthand fifth centuries before Christ had actually already spoken of aconcept of physis like the one which has been self-evident sinceAristotle. The title "On Nature" occurs for the first time inPlato—in the Phaedo. We may conclude from this that concept ofphysis as well as the title had become customary at that time. Theword itself had long been used but always only as the nature ofsomething, hence not as the concept of nature. This, indeed, onlybegins in Platonic times. But, of course, the formation of the con-cept as such had long since been prepared for within the lan-guage. Nevertheless, this was not yet an actual formation of theconcept. I completely agree with the English scholars, Kirk andRaven, that the concept of physis in Heraclitus did not yet haveany philosophical import. On the contrary, we must assume thatan actual concept began to form only when the counter-conceptto it had also taken shape, and that takes us into the sophistic age.At that time the discussion of the problem of language centeredon whether language is a product of nature or of societal rules(nomos). The concept of techne does not arise until late either,and all of this fits in with Sophism and with Plato's use of physisin connection with psyche.

The concept of physis gains its particular importance, how-ever, in Aristotle. When Aristotle comments frequently and exten-sively on the concept, it is always accompanied by a consciousdistancing of himself from Plato. For, in Aristotle's eyes, Platowas too much of a mathematician.

At any rate, neither in Heraclitus nor in Empedocles is theword used in a sense that anticipates the Aristotelian concept of

Solid Ground: Plato and Aristotle 35

physis. For Aristotle, however, physis is the first appearance ofbeing and constantly thrusts itself forward in his Metaphysics.Metaphysics is really just a loose collective concept that clearlyshows its connection with the fundamental Aristotelian interest inphysis but [the Metaphysics] is not, in any case, as coherent acontext for physis as the books of Aristotle's Physics.

We must constantly have the preeminence of the Aristotelianconcept firmly in mind if we want to evaluate the Presocratic cita-tions. But, apart from Aristotle's Physics, there is another relevantpoint which we must take into account when dealing with the Pre-socratic passages that have been handed down to us, a point whichwas commonly understood in the Hellenistic age—if not literally,then at least in an academic sense: for us, Hegel's interpretation,more than any other, has taken root so deeply that we can neverimagine how we could completely free ourselves from this model.I am thus convinced that the whole problem of "Parmenides andHeraclitus**is due to the overweening influence of Hegel's way ofthinking. We should not forget that, in spite of the fact that all ofthe nineteenth-century historical scholarship that introduced his-toriography into the study of Greek philosophy took place duringthe decline of Hegelian idealism, Hegel's construction of historyhas still proven to be very influential even with historians—withZeller, for example.

Yet, how weak these constructions of history are according towhich philosophy begins with Thales and the Milesian school.What really was a "school" at that time in a thriving trading cen-ter like Miletus? We can scarcely give an answer to this. But what,then, does the traditional academic sequence of Thales-Anaximander-Anaximenes mean? This ordering is, in fact,extremely problematic. That Anaximander supposedly took theinfinite as his starting place and that, after him, Anaximenes sup-posedly declared air to be the first substance—what an absurdstep backwards! In truth, all this shows is that these assertions donot rest on historical realities but on a way of thinking belongingto a later academic period, the period in which Apollodoros hadreconstructed the chronological evidence.

Actually, there is yet another perspective that we must keepin view in this sphere of inquiry and that is the religious back-ground against which Greek philosophy, following Aristotle,stood out. It is [summed up in] the familiar catchphrase, "FromMythos to Logos."

35


This is a contemporary formulation. But what do we under-stand in this case by mythos? In nineteenth-century historiogra-phy the answer seemed clear: mythos had to do with Homericreligion. But did a Homeric religion in this sense really exist? Ifone follows Herodotus, mythos was rather the deed of a greatpoet who did his creating from out of a manifold tradition of leg-ends and from out of an oral tradition sustained by rhapsodesgoing back to a very early age. The other poet to whom we refer(following Herodotus) when we speak of the "theology'* of thattime is Hesiod and his Theogony. Now, it is certainly true thatHomer and Hesiod are also referred to by Aristotle as the firstones to reflect upon the divine. But by saying this, Aristotle doesnot mean to speak of religion so much as cosmologically orderedideas and a divine family with all of its all-too-human tensions. Inview of this, the customary schema, "From Mythos to Logos,"appears to be quite dubious. Perhaps one would have to say thatin both cases one is dealing more with logos than with mythos.On the one hand, we have the noble society of the gods, like agroup of great lords; on the other hand, we find throughout thecountry a wide variety of sites for religious cults dedicated to indi-vidual deities. The expression "theology** fits both cases ratherbadly. Werner Jaeger has treated this theme with admirable eru-dition in his important book, The Theology of the Early GreekThinkers. But the word "Theology** in the title is quite mislead-ing. To be sure, the above-mentioned book is extremely instruc-tive, but, in the case of Xenophanes, the viewpoint that the word"theology** expresses in the title does not work very convincing-ly. To me, the chapter that Jaeger had written on Xenophanes ear-lier, in the first volume of his Paideia, at a time when he still hadin mind the sophistic idea of paideia, seemed much more apt. Iam convinced that Jaeger was right in his earlier discussion whenhe saw in Xenophanes' verses a typical portrayal by a rhapsodeand not a theologian or a philosopher.

But enough of these introductory remarks! Let us begin thereal work of interpreting Plato's and Aristotle's most importantreferences to Presocratic philosophy.

Let us begin afresh with Plato or, more precisely, with thePhaedo (96ff.). Here, Plato—long after Socrates' tragic end—hasSocrates sketching his scientific and philosophical autobiography.Before we go into the interpretation of this text, however, it isappropriate to stress once again that I cannot make the whole


work my object, but rather only one instance within it. The textto which we will refer is merely one chapter out of a whole, acomplete work. In essence, the complete dialogue—the Phaedo inits entirety—is the one text on the basis of which it is possible,although certainly not easy, to work out the question for whichPlato is trying to provide an answer. This dialogue belongs amongPlato's most famous. Nietzsche designated the figure drawn byPlato of Socrates immediately before his death as the new idealfor the leading young men of Greece, and thus Socrates steppedinto the place of Achilles. There is definitely something true inthis. One does indeed find a Homeric motif at the beginning ofthe dialogue: the enormous secret of death and of what liesbeyond death—the "life" of the souls of the dead in Hades.Recall those unforgettable scenes with which Homer (or whoev-er composed the Odyssey) portrays Odysseus' trip to Hades.Odysseus goes down into Hades in order to visit the heroes ofTroy. The most important thing to ponder here is the meetingwith Achilles, who, like all the souls beyond the Acheron, has losthis memory and regains it as he drinks the sacrificial blood: a pro-foundly significant ritual. Upon hearing from Odysseus that hisson has conquered Troy, Achilles returns, deeply moved, to thedarkness. Death is the night of memory; without memories wedie. We could say that all of these images point us toward some-thing like a popular religion. It is also clear, however, that a themeof reflection is introduced here. The shadows of the heroes do stillexist down there in Hades, but they have left all memoriesbehind, and only the sacrificial blood awakens these memories.Therefore, the problem posed here has to do with the soul and thequestion of the soul's relationship to life and death.

At this point, there is a further source of possible misunder-standings that influences our way of thinking. I mean the Augus-tinian concept of the soul as the inferiority of consciousness. Thecomplex Christian doctrine of the soul and its redemptionthrough the sacrificial death of Jesus has been integrated into ourconcept of the soul.1 The German word "Seele" is an expressionthat is more likely to recall sentimentality than perhaps the Latinword "anima" does, and, in a phonetic sense, it also suggestssomething far more transitory. Thus we stand under the influenceof a tradition that pushes us to believe that in Homeric poetry

1. Seele


there may be an idea of the soul that is somehow the same as ourown. Or is this still true?

At any rate, the supposed "religion of Homer" is not the onlysource of prejudice for the interpreter. Besides this, there is alsothe so-called Orphic, an idea which has influenced scholarship fora long time and which still represents a completely open realm ofproblems for research. What was really going on in this religiousmovement—a movement that stretched back into the seventh andsixth centuries before Christ but did not yet exist in Homer's timeor, at least, was not received by the poet? The amazing plethoraof religious movements and myths that came together at that timeremains just as much an open problem as the emergence of theDionysus cult; for, as we have come to realize well enough sinceNietzsche's writings, the figure of Dionysus was virtuallyunknown in the Homeric epic. In any case, we are dealing withextremely vague things here, and in this area of Presocratic stud-ies our interest lies only in the fact that the soul was at the centerof the cult's religiosity. What the figure of Pythagoras has to dowith all of this seems obvious to me. If one reads the biographiesof the Presocratics, the same thing shows up again and again:every one of them, from Anaximander to Parmenides and so on,is portrayed as a follower of Pythagoras. This fact is quite signif-icant. In my estimation, it means that Pythagoras brings togetherfundamental motifs like the riddle of numbers and the riddles ofthe soul, the transmigration of the soul, and the purification ofthis soul. This leads us to the problem of memory. It is clear that,as a rule, a religion that speaks of reincarnation presupposes theloss of memory. That someone like Empedocles has a vague clair-voyant impression of having been something else in another lifeseems to be an exception to this rule.

A number of problems connected with the soul impose them-selves at this point. Is the soul a breath which animates animalsand people? Is it like a first light within the human being, the lightof incipient knowledge, of memory, or of some such thing? All ofthis remains a vague background that cannot be used as the keyto understanding. It lies in the darkness of antiquity. Thus wemust examine how the problem of the soul is dealt with in thePhaedo in order to see which problems preoccupied a thinker ofPlato's time. This is an example of the problem I raised earlier, theproblem of how we can interpret a tradition we are interested inby using a text that was not drafted for this purpose but which


nevertheless permits us to guess at certain basic tendencies of theculture of this bygone era.

By way of conclusion, we could formulate the problem as fol-lows: is the soul something other than the vital energy of the liv-ing? Is it something like a special spiritual capacity? Is it living oris it thinking? Or are these two aspects intertwined with oneanother? And in what way? This is Plato's theme, and it is withPlato's help that we must seek to grasp how the Presocratics dealtwith death. Here, I would like to add one last general remarkabout the Phaedo—ot, rather, about the setting of the dialogue.Socrates' two conversation partners, as we know, are Pythago-reans who were living in exile in Athens during that time becausetheir society had previously dissolved as a result of politicalevents. Simmias and Cebes are historical figures. They do not,strictly speaking, represent the original Pythagoreans but ratherthe evolution of this religious and political body into a group ofscholars and scientists. This is a point we should keep in mind aswe read the conversation between Socrates and the two friends.The two were no longer Pythagoreans in the sense of being fol-lowers of the great founder of a half-religion. The dialogue con-cerns a discussion with two scientists who only use the themesand teachings of the Pythagoreans in order to describe the resultsof the new science of their time. As I see it, this is a very impor-tant fact. Who the real Pythagoreans were is a topic that has beendiscussed at great length. I still remember the radical thesis thatErich Frank put forward when I was young in his book, Platoand the So-called Pythagoreans.2 He claimed that our entire cus-tomary idea of the Pythagoreans as mathematicians, astro-nomers, etc., was a new interpretation taken up by Plato's schooland particularly by Heracleides Ponticus. The radicality of thisthesis has not been generally accepted. Today, we even take it ascertain that there was already a Pythagorean mathematics, albeitset against a religious background. But, in any case, we mustrealize that in Plato's time it was not religion but science that pre-dominated. That the two conversation partners with whomSocrates talks in the Phaedo are scientists is shown by the factthat they seem to have no knowledge of the religious prescrip-tions of Philolaos, a great master of the sect, but are wellinformed about the biology and the astronomy of Plato's epoch.

2. Halle: Niemeyei; 1923; reprint Tubingen 1962.

39


How does Plato manage to bring the discussion of an old reli-gious tradition and a science belonging to his own time so read-ily into the structure of the action and incorporate them bothinto his depiction of the interlocutors? Of course, the conceptionof science to which Plato alludes in the Phaedo does not at allcorrespond to what was held to be valid at the time of Socrates'death. Today, no one doubts that this dialogue was written notshortly after Socrates' death but much later—perhaps twentyyears later. Plato apparently takes up the figure of the dyingSocrates again as he begins to outline the main points of his the-ory of Ideas and establishes a kind of school, the Academy to beprecise, which we can more readily call a real school—in contrastto the so-called schools of the Sophists, the Atomists, or theEleatics, etc., which were not institutions.

I consider these remarks to be important for understandinghow the Phaedo is connected to our theme. The discussion of theproblem of the soul finds its crowning conclusion in Socrates'long autobiographical narrative—stemming from Plato, ofcourse—in which he depicts his experiences with scientists of histime and his own new orientation. But in this account—just as inothers of his dialogues—Plato is not claiming to depict "Preso-cratic" doctrines but rather his own turn toward the "Idea."

4Life and Soul:The Phaedo

The theme of the Pheado, which is developed in the account ofthe last day of Socrates* life, is the problem of life and death

as well as the question of what the life of a human being is andwhat relationship this has with what we call the soul or the psy-che. This dialogue consists of a discussion about the problem ofthe soul and the belief in immortality that the religions teach. Canour reason find a rational ground for this?

The Pheado begins in an almost religious tone. It is has to dowith the question of suicide and the expectation of a new life afterdeath. This is the dialogue's prelude out of which the immortali-ty of the soul will then unfold as its real theme. The bridgebetween the two parts depends upon the idea of catharsis, ofpurification; and for our interpretation this is crucially important.The philosophical dimension opens up from here.

It is well-known that the Pythagorean doctrine of catharsiswas, above all, a collection of purity laws, like, for instance, theproscription against using a knife to stir the fire, or like that othercommandment: Eat no beans. The decisive thing here is that Platoimbues these purity rituals with a new meaning, precisely thatmeaning that has become familiar to us through Kant and theconcept of "pure reason." As already follows from the Meno andthe theory of pure mathematical concepts formulated there,mathematics is pure reason to the extent that it transcends whatis accessible through the senses. This holds for mathematics—butalso for the soul. Indeed, just as the moral and religious view of


life requires the separation of the soul from the body, mathemat-ical science requires separation from sensory experience. If deathis conceived of as a separation of the soul from what is corporeal/sensory, then, in this sense, the life of the philosopher is a path todeath, and thus the religious doctrine of the soul's immortalityfinds its corroboration.

The first argument for the immortality of the soul calls uponthe cyclical structure of nature. Since life is a natural phenome-non, death might also be nothing other than a stage in the cycleof coming into existence and passing away, genesis and pbtho-ra (Phaedo 70e ff.). The line of reasoning that bases itself on thecircular character of nature is depicted here with wonderful lin-guistic skill. When Plato speaks of a nature in which there is nocontinual return to new life, he causes his Socrates to speak alanguage that conveys the impression of a nature withoutspring. Thus, insofar as Socrates conclusively (71e) asserts thereality of rebirth, anabioskesthai, the conception of nature as acycle becomes an overt argument for the soul's return. It seemsto follow from this that if the living are generated from thedead, then the souls of the dead cannot perish but must contin-ue to exist.

Very surprisingly, then, the text reads: kai tats men ge agath-ais ameinon einai, tais de kakais kakion (72e), which means"this new existence will necessarily be better for good souls andworse for the wicked." This assertion seems to fit so poorly withthe cycle argument that some philologists have omitted it. Imyself am not sure this is the right thing to do. Its situation inthe manuscript is unambiguous; there are no variants to the pas-sage. The argument is found throughout the entire tradition, atradition which has perhaps been a little wiser than these philol-ogists and has understood that precisely this lack of logical con-sistency lay within Plato's intentions. He thereby indicates whichinterest truly stands behind the belief in immortality. The subse-quent fate of the deceased should depend upon the morality ofthe life that one has led—which will ultimately be the point ofthe entire dialogue. Then, in response to Simmias' doubt andhesitant uncertainty, Socrates will reply that, although it is cer-tainly correct that there are no guarantees in this realm, it is stillundoubtedly better to lead an honest life. Here it becomes abun-dantly clear that Socrates does not actually claim to have"proven" the soul's immortality when he says that a life with this

Life and Soul: The Phaedo 43

attitude is better than a life without it. We should notice thathere the argument forsakes the realm of logic and moves into therealm of rhetoric.

I am reminded that the same turn in the argument also occursin Kant. In Kant, too, there is no proof that freedom really exists.If we really wanted to produce this proof by interrogating natureand even seeing a proof for free will in quantum physics, thenthat would mean being blind from the start with respect to theontological status1 of freedom. Freedom is not a fact of naturalscience. Kant calls it a fact of reason—Plato's line of reasoning is,of course, a different one. He is not driving at the fact that sciencehas its limits, nor is he emphasizing the honest life. Rather, Plato'sargument also contains something transcendental and aims at thelimitedness of our human reason in view of the riddle of deathand eternity. In this sense one could say that Hegel's "bad infini-ty" is also Plato's position: as far as the main question of moral-ity and life is concerned, the dialectic remains unresolved andthere is no result that can claim to be a proof.

Of course, this comparison between Kant and Plato does notreally concern the concept of freedom, for there is no such con-cept in Plato's philosophy. I want, rather, to say the following:just as Kant refrains from establishing freedom through a theo-retical line of reasoning—as does Fichte for practical reason—soPlato does not enlist the help of theoretical arguments to provethe immortality of the soul. Instead, he goes back to the figure ofSocrates and to his unflinching death, which he explicitly refers toat the end the dialogue.

But we can maintain one thing: all of this demonstrates theinappropriateness of an argument for or against the soul's immor-tality that bases itself on a naturalistically derived concept of thesoul. Here, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that myuse of the term "naturalistically" rather than "materialistical-ly"—which is always a little too Aristotelian—is not accidental.We can perhaps apply this latter term to an interpretation of theSophist, but, as we will see, even there is it not completely appro-priate. Strictly speaking, what is "materialistic" assumes the ideato be morphe or form—and thus it also assumes fabrication, likein the model of the craftsperson who shapes the stuff, the mater-ial. I prefer the term "naturalistic," which corresponds to the

1. Seins-Rang


Greek concept of physis and which, incidentally, we also comeacross in this dialogue. The intellectual autobiography of Socratesbegins, as we have already stated, with his declaration that he hadoccupied himself in detail with the problems of "nature." This is"history** in the Greek sense, that is to say, in the sense of a reportof personal observations on the part of a traveler, for instance,who communicates what he has observed on his journey. In thissense the title, peri physeos historia, must be understood as areport of the experiences undergone by the witness to events, asthe story of a person who has himself seen the things that he iscommenting on. Moreover, it is clear that in the meantime, in thetime of the Pheado, this was already a popular title for designat-ing treatises on nature, the cosmos, the heavens, and so on.

The second argument—which Simmias presents as a well-known Socratic doctrine—is that of anamnesis. Socrates statesthat knowledge must be a remembering because, for example,mathematical concepts—such as to ison (equality)—cannot begained from experience, for in experience there are never twocompletely identical entities. (This theme reminds me of Leibniz,who invited his students to the Valley of the Roses in Leipzig tolook for two entirely identical leaves.) The mathematical conceptof equality is that of complete equality, which we never encounterin sensory experience. In Socrates* view this goes for the soul aswell—that the soul, like equality as such, cannot be perceived insensory experience.

But I am not interested in offering a complete interpretation ofthe Pheado. So I now turn directly to the two Presocratic forerun-ners of Plato's philosophy as they are understood in Plato's texts. Tothis end, let us now examine the two objections to the immortalityof the soul that the two "enlightened** Pythagoreans, Simmias andCebes, offer, objections which lead to the high point of the dialogue.

The first objection, formulated by Simmias, is readily under-standable even to modern thinking: the soul is nothing more thanthe harmony of the body. As soon as its strength flags, the har-monic cooperation of its limbs also wanes until death occurs,wherewith the soul ultimately dissolves altogether. This is obvi-ously an argument derived from the science of the time; statedmore precisely: with its concept of harmony, it is a typicalPythagorean argument. Moreover, it comes quite close to the wayAristotle defines the concept of the soul; it is the "entelechy of thebody,** hence the full actuality of the living organism.


Immediately after this comes Cebes' objection that immortal-ity does not necessarily follow from reincarnation; the soul, withits migration through the different bodies, could consume itselfmore and more and finally dissolve itself along with the last body.Undoubtedly this objection reflects one of the discoveries of thebiology of that time. As we know, science in Plato's time—andmedical science in particular—had already conceived of theregeneration of living organisms as a continual process. We cantherefore understand the objection that despite the soul's tran-scending the limits of an individual existence, its migrationexhausts it, and it finally dissolves itself completely. This is aninescapable idea dictated by a naturalistic conception of the souland especially by the idea that the soul is nothing more than theharmony of the body and for that reason is impelled to dissipatealong with the body.

These two objections are perceived as truly catastrophic forthe immortality of the soul. They seem so plausible that evenPhaedo and Echecrates, the two narrators of the dialogue, inter-rupt the account to express their bewilderment. The deep despon-dency of the mood that spreads among the interlocutors is unpar-alleled by any poem. This points to the fact that the dialoguetakes a decisive turn at this moment of highest tension. Inresponse to Simmias' objection, Socrates replies that the problemcannot be posed at all in the terms that Simmias has used to for-mulated it. The soul is not really the same as harmony. Rather,harmony is something that the soul itself only seeks to gain or tofind. In any case, the harmonious soul is nothing given by naturebut rather a good that prescribes the direction for life. It seemsclear to me that we must make a strict differentiation here. Onthe one hand, we are dealing with the conflict between a natural-istic or, if you will, a mathematical theory of harmony in that itforms itself from out of its constitutive parts. On the other hand,we are dealing with a harmony toward which the soul is strivingas though towards a highest goal.

The second objection, that of Cebes, demands a more com-plex reply. Socrates remains silent a few moments and concen-trates completely. Then he begins as follows: in order to attainclarity, it is necessary, above all, to discuss the cause of cominginto being and passing away (genesis and phthora). Only in thisway will it be possible to correctly understand the meaning ofdeath. In order to reach this clarity, Socrates begins to talk about


his experiences with the science of his time until he decided totake quite a different path, namely, the path into the logoi, thepath toward the ideas.

Here, I would like to interrupt our textual analysis in order to putforward once again some general concepts that I mentioned ear-lier. Above all, I would like to make a supplementary hermeneu-tical remark. There can be no doubt that in the course of mywork I have become an advocate of the bad infinite that Hegelcriticizes. It is nevertheless a very simple truth that I am advocat-ing here, namely, that something like a general history—for whichin German we have the expression "Weltgeschichte"2—must bewritten anew by each generation. It seems quite evident to methat along with historical change itself the ways of observing andknowing the past must also change. Nevertheless, this truth can-not be applied so easily to the philosophical tradition; for hi thiscase it means recognizing that this tradition itself has not alreadycome to its conclusion with the great Hegelian synthesis, but thatthere may be still other expressions of thought that can also opennew perspectives for us. One such expression, for example, isNietzsche's, who, whatever authenticity he attained in his con-ceptual work, certainly cannot be compared with Hegel. Never-theless, Nietzsche has pervaded our whole attitude toward thepast and has left his mark on our philosophical work.

This prompts me to offer a few words on a concept that Iintroduced—the concept of effective-historical consciousness.This term is meant to imply that we are fully aware of the con-stitutive prejudices of our understanding. Of course, we cannotreally know all of our prejudices because we are never in a posi-tion to reach an exhaustive knowledge of ourselves and tobecome completely transparent to ourselves. On the other hand,mis circumstance—that prejudices are constitutive for under-standing—in no way means that the approach to a text is an arbi-trary decision of the thinker or scholar involved. For these preju-dices are nothing other than our rootedness in a tradition—in thesame tradition, in fact, that we seek to bring to language as weinterrogate the text. Herein lies the complexity of the hermeneu-tical situation. It always depends upon the kind of text one isdealing with. Our classical culture is the stuff of hermeneutics,

2. world history


and it is found for us in multiple forms, not just in scholarly pur-suits but above all within the traditions of theology, jurispru-dence, philology; but it is clear that our most profound impres-sions go much deeper than we could know or ever fathom.

All of this also helps us to understand, for example, the dif-ference between Plato's writings and Aristotle's "doxography."Plato's writings are not working notes but literary works, and thisis why the doxography in these writings is something entirely dif-ferent from what Aristotle offers us, for instance, in the Meta-physics, the Physics, and De anima. Plato's texts were, in theirown way, published and were intended to be read and even givenas lectures in Athens. This is why those writings of Aristode's thathave been preserved were unknown for centuries—they werecomposed as teaching notes, which may have continued to havean effect within the oral tradition for a few generations, but noth-ing that was intended for the public has come down to us—atleast, not such that anything we have could be considered Aristo-de's last word on die subject

On the other hand, take the Pheado. It is obvious that this isnot a treatise but a work of high literature. There are true-to-lifeportrayals in this piece, and it accomplishes a complete fusion oftheoretical argumentation and dramatic action. Thus in the Phea-do the strongest argument put forward for the soul's immortalityis really not an argument at all but the fact that Socrates holdsonto his convictions right up to the end and corroborates themthrough his living and dying. Here, the course of the action itselfplays the role of an argument. At the end of the dialogue standsa myth, the myth describing the earth upon which we live anddepicting, moreover, how this earth ought to be the scene for ahonest life. We can never really provide satisfactory arguments inanswer to questions about the constitution of a world that isbased on the principle of the good. Thus it happens that myths,with their particular forcefulness, get their chance instead. Platohimself tries to sound the cautionary note that with myths we arenot dealing with mere stories, but that concepts and reflectionsare also woven into them. Therefore, they are like an extension ofthe dialectical argument—an extension in a direction that is inac-cessible to concepts and logical substantiation.

Even Socratic ignorance is a literary figure. It is the patternwhich helps Socrates lead the conversation partner to draw uponhis own ignorance in comparison. The end of the dialogue, Lysis,


is exemplary in this sense. Neither Menexenos nor Lysis succeedsin defining friendship, and the dialogue is suddenly interrupted asthe teachers intervene and take the boys home. This negative end-ing is a model which is likewise found in all of the elenctic dia-logues. They are always about the same problem, namely, that inorder to put a virtue into practice one must already be directedtoward it in a theoretical way. In this regard, we can indeed speakof the intellectualism of the Greeks, yet we must add by way of elu-cidation that we are dealing here with an intentionality that neverfully corresponds to commensurate concepts. In Plato (who was atremendous writer of the rank of a Sophocles or a Shakespeare),wherever concepts are inadequate this intentionality is expressed inthe action of the dialogue—in the case of the Lysis, in the dialogi-cal relationship between Socrates and his two young friends.

On the other hand, take the text of the Politeia:3 there we finda Socrates who—in the way he conducts a conversation and anargument—seems to be a quite different person. Here, Platowants to describe an ideal city, one in which an elite class isformed in the field of mathematics and the dialectic, an elite whowill be able to govern practical life. In my work, The Idea of theGood in Platonic and Aristotelian Philosophy, I present the the-sis that both philosophers are concerned with the same thing,namely, the problem of the good and its concretization in an idealcity. Yet one must recognize that the ethos of Plato's Politeia hasa Utopian dimension that does not correspond to anything at allin Aristotle. This ethos appears in Plato's Politeia in such a waythat everything there is regulated. There it is nearly impossible todo anything evil or abnormal, an idea which seems inconceivableto the modern person. It would only take a miscalculation on thepart of the "planning committee," as one could call it, to carrythe Utopia too far and bring the downfall of this ideal city.

A further peculiarity of the Platonic dialogues is thatSocrates' interlocutors express themselves in quite a colorlessway—they say "yes," "no," "maybe," "of course"—with no fur-ther character development. This is no accident. The authorintends it. No one should try to see these dialogue participants asspecific types as if we were dealing with a drama. In Plato's dia-logues, the conversation partner is more like a shadow in whicheach reader is meant to recognize him- or herself.

3. I.e., the Republic.


All of these remarks should not only clarify the differencesbetween a Platonic dialogue and a didactic Aristotelian text butalso the differences among the texts we have from Plato. Thesetexts must be continually questioned in such manner that theyanswer in a different way each time; for the living dialogue, thecommunication between people, and the participation in thewritten tradition are all structured in such a way that they occuras if by themselves. The tradition is not something rigid; it is notfixed once and for all. There are no laws there. Even the churchmust deal with a living tradition and a continual conversationwith this tradition.

5The Soul betweenNature and Spirit

Let us return to our main Platonic text, the Phaedo. The mostimportant part of the dialogue (96a) begins with the answer

to Cebes introduced by a long silence, and kideed the dialoguenow turns to the question of a general principle for knowledge. Itholds true for all knowledge (holds) that in questions of becom-ing and passing away we must always look for the cause.

This is the moment in which Socrates begins telling how hehimself has fared with this passion for knowledge (his pathe, hispainful experiences). He studied the sciences of his time withgreat interest. Clearly, this depiction refers to the contemporaryunderstanding of nature and medicine. According to Socrates,therefore, he tried to understand the "soul" in terms of those sci-ences that we have discussed as naturalism—how the "soul" orig-inates, whether the brain is the seat of the sensations, how recol-lection and memory, and then the formation of opinion,1 emergefrom it, and how knowledge originates from the establishment ofrecollection, memory, and the formation of opinion. If we nowreflect upon the fact that recollection is the ability to hold on tosomething so that it is durably present and remains in the memo-ry and that opinion-formation is also something that wants toremain stable and permanently valid, then here we find the firsthint of the Platonic problem—how anything stable at all couldarise from the stream of the sensual experiences. How the

1. Gedachtnis und Erinnerung und dann Meinungsbildung

The Soul between Nature and Spirit 51

intentionality of thinking develops within the framework of thephysical organism remains a puzzling problem even for us. Here,for the first time, Plato points to this puzzle in terms of the oppo-sition of flow and stability, and in doing so he points to the maintheme of the Theatetus.

Ultimately, Socrates confesses that all his efforts have yield-ed no results about knowledge—indeed to the very end heunderstood nothing more at all, even when it concerned thingswhich he had previously believed he knew something about,like, for instance, how human beings grow. He illustrates thisexample with help of a quantitative-mathematical argument,which, however, contains a logical difficulty. Socrates says, thatis, that he had previously thought the cause of the humangrowth lay in the fact that material elements were added to theorganism through food. But lurking behind this is the problemof how duality2—meaning at the same time the two in relationto the one—is formed, whether through the addition to a unityor through division of the unity. Here, we are faced with theparadox that the formation of the two could by caused either byaddition or by separation. As such, this is indeed contradictory.How is this possible?

For us it seems obvious that the answer should be that whenwe speak of increasing or decreasing we are not dealing with anactual process. Rather, the problem must be viewed within a quitedifferent ontological dimension and not at all in connection withthe problem of what truly causes something to come into exis-tence and pass away. With the next step that Socrates takes, wereally begin to overcome the first and apparently inadequate kindof question concerning the cause of becoming and passing away.That is, Socrates tells us how in his search for this cause he cameacross the text of Anaxagoras and believed that there, namely innous, he had finally found a solution for the problem of causationand along with this how two comes to be from out of one. But inthe end this hope is also disappointed. The passage is quitefamous, and I recall it here only because we can find in it a con-firmation of our own interpretive perspective. Socrates' hope, hiscritique of Anaxagoras, and the function of nous apparently indi-cate the lack here of a conceptuality that corresponds to what isintended. When Anaxagoras speaks of "HO«S," it is clear that

2. das Zweierlei

51


Socrates wants to ascribe to this word a meaning like "thinking,""ordering," "planning," and in the received text (which we oweto the zeal of Simplicius) Anaxagoras actually presents nous firstas the creator of order in the universe—almost in the sense of acosmogonic theory—but then, in the description of this process,Anaxagoras ultimately refers only to HOMS'S physical effects in theformation of the universe.

When we resume our interpretation of the text once again, werind that Socrates counters this by saying (99c) that the true ori-gin of each thing as well as its inner determination is the good.With regard to this claim, he criticizes the various theories of theearth's place in the cosmos: the one according to which the earthis kept in place because it is surrounded by the motion of the uni-verse as though by an enormous vessel, or one that imagines thatthe earth is carried on the air as though on a pillow, or even theone that believes it to be supported by Atlas. In Socrates' eyes, allthese ideas are much like the famous Indian fable in which theglobe is carried on an elephant who, for his part, stands on a tur-tle—at which point we cannot understand how it is that the tur-tle does not, in turn, have to rest on something else. If we wantto avoid such an infinite regress we must look for the answer tothe question of causation in something other than the physical,such as, for instance, in the good.

Indeed this marks a complete shift in the trajectory of theargument. It is no longer about history (historia), no longerabout the quest for something capable of carrying the earth.Formulated in these ways, the question has no answer. In theCritique of Pure Reason—in the transcendental dialectic, to beprecise—Kant refutes the possibility of a rational cosmology.Nevertheless, even there the problem of the creation of theworld, the problem of its beginning and its determination as arequirement of pure reason, remains a question without ananswer. But the Platonic Socrates says that the good is the ori-gin from which the order of the world in its totality is derived,the world of human beings with their praxis, and the order ofthe universe with all its components, the sun, the moon and thestars, the earth, and so on. For the first time, the idea of thegood, "the whole," comes into view in a completely differentsense from the whole grasped as sum of all its individual parts,provided we thus understand this to be what one might call theobject of historical inquiry. Here, Socrates formulates a task


that is later developed in Aristotle's Physics, namely, an inter-pretation of reality based on the idea of the good. In this way,the teleological structure of Greek natural philosophy ultimate-ly becomes generally accepted and has, in a certain sense,retained its relevance. For it suggests the concept of a totality inwhich nature, the human being, and society are all viewed asmembers of one and the same system. Seen from this perspec-tive, the modern sciences are like ancient history: they accumu-late an indefinite quantity of experiences that can never reachthe whole because the whole is not an experiential concept—itcan never be given. But how is it at all possible to reach a con-vincing and certain solution for the problem of causation? Atthis point, Plato begins his positive answer by, first of all, settingup a rule: we must presuppose as true the one hypothesis thatappears particularly cogent and certain, and we must hold astrue the consequences following therefrom that stand in harmo-ny with this hypothesis. But "hypothesis," here, does not meanthe same as it does in the terminology of modern scientific the-ory. It does not mean that the validity of the hypothesis must beverified on the basis of experience, hence on the basis of the"facts." No, here we are dealing only with the logical, imma-nent coherence of the concepts. The consequences we speak ofat this point are not the consequences that result from empiricalfacts. This is a crucial point. The epistemologists of the English-speaking world who have employed this mode of argumentationrecognize its logical value, but they miss the real criterion oftruth in this context, namely, experience. It is true that Platodoes not mention experience here at all. But why not? The rea-son for this is that we are dealing here with the logos, with thefamous turn to the logoi. In Socrates' eyes, the linguistic uni-verse possesses more reality than immediate experience. So, justas the sun—according to the famous metaphor—cannot beobserved directly but only on the basis of its reflection in water,whoever who wants to get information about the true nature ofthings will achieve clarity sooner in the logoi than throughdeceptive sensory experience.

Thus Plato insists on elucidating each hypothesis in view ofits consequences, and he bases his criticism of the enemies oflogic on this. Whenever we fail to make the content of a con-cept explicit, it becomes fruitless to discuss it. When usingwords and arguments, it is always easy to become confused.


The Sophists' technique of argumentation is aimed directly atthis confusion. On the other hand, to the extent that the truecontent of a hypothesis is unfolded, it gains its logical believ-ability through observation.

At this point, the argument in which the cause is equated withthe idea begins. It proceeds from the ideas of the beautiful, thegood, the large, and so on. Clearly, there is a parallel betweenthese essences and those of mathematics: the beautiful, the goodand the large are also not derived from experience. In any case, theeidos seems to be somehow in the things. I say this with extremecaution. For there is no ontological separation here as Aristotleassumes; rather, what this means (lOOd) is that there is nothingthrough which a thing is beautiful except the presence of the beau-tiful. In this text as in the rest of Plato's writings there is never amore precise theory of participation in the idea given—a pointwhich Aristotle criticizes. Plato is completely free in his choice ofconcepts that formulate the relationship between the idea and theparticular. The two are not as separated from each other as Aris-totle's criticism would have it and according to whom the ideawould be a mere duplication of the world. This point is cruciallyimportant. The Academy knew many theories about the intimaterelationship between general and particular, yet there was no con-cept of their separation. In contrast to this, the separation betweenmathematics and physics was fundamental. Therein lay Plato'sgreat advance with respect to the Pythagoreans. Archytas, forexample, was an outstanding mathematician who also alreadyknew that mathematics does not deal with the triangle drawn inthe sand but that this is merely a picture of its true object. Never-theless, the Pythagoreans had not yet reached the point of concep-tually formulating the true, "pure" object of mathematics. Forthem, mathematics always turned into "physics."

The separation of mathematics and physics does not mean,though, that numbers and geometrical figures exist in anotherworld. Similarly, the beautiful, the just, or the good is never[something belonging to] a second world of essences. This is amisguided ontologizing of Plato's intentions provoked by theinfluence of the subsequent tradition. It can already be seen incriticism of Aristotle, who, for his part, was guided precisely byhis interest in the physical. It is Neoplatonism, as we call this tra-dition today, that first makes a thinker of transcendence out ofPlato, and this was also the Plato of the nineteenth century.


As Socrates' argument progresses it leads him to maintainthat the idea is not only identical with itself but proves itself to beinsolubly linked with certain other ideas. So, for instance,warmth is obviously connected with fire. This relationship ofideas to one another is the most interesting point. Only in thisway does the logos exist. It is not the simple appearance of anindividual word but the linking of one word with another, theUnking of one concept with another. Only in this way is logicalproof possible at all, and precisely because of this we are able toexplicate the implications contained in a hypothesis. What are theconsequences of this for the theme of "the soul"?

In thinking through the connection between different ideaswe see that the soul as a life principle is necessarily connectedwith an idea, namely, with the idea of life, an idea that cannot bereconciled with death. At this point, something is put forwardthat, it seems to me, Plato's interpreters have not adequatelygrasped. This conclusion of Socrates' seems convincing to the dia-logue partners and also to the reader. It is indeed true that theidea of the soul, insofar as it is brought into connection with life,cannot be reconciled with the idea of death. This entails that thesoul is life itself, and, consequently, it is clearly "deathless"(athanatos). Here, of course, the soul is obviously being treated asa principle of life—albeit in a specific form. But for Socrates thesoul is above all else the orientation toward pure essences, pureideas. In any case, this conclusion seems clear.

Yet, Socrates now continues in a way that is surprising for themodern reader (106a ff.). He asserts that the soul, insofar as it isimmortal, is also indestructible and indissoluble (anolethros). Themeaning of the word "athanatos" is clear. It is a typical term fromthe Greek epic tradition and it indicates something being lifted upinto a higher state of being. It is the predicate of divinity, Homer'sathanatoi.3 But what does anolethros mean? The argument isquite difficult here. Above all we need to keep in mind that theargument runs parallel to the previous description of immortali-ty. Those passages in which the discussion occurs seem to consid-er the equivalence of immortality and indestructibility to be com-pletely plausible, an equivalence which Aristotle also corrobo-rates (Physics 203/13). Of course, the suspicion arises here that itmay possibly have been Aristotle himself who introduced this

3. Literally, "deathless ones."


inseparability of immortality and indestructibility into the doxo-graphical tradition of the Presocratics. We should not forget,however, that it was Plato who, in the Phaedo, discovered thedecisive arguments. But could he possibly have had grounds forthis? Proceeding from the religious background of the by thenwaning Pythagoreans, Plato attempts to carry through with theiridea of immortality and their belief in the transmigration of thesoul (against the threat of materialism) in that, with clarity, hebrings into play an eidetic realm, a realm of relationships we canconceive of just as we do in mathematics. If we trace the entirePlatonic argument in these passages (106a-b), then we see thatthe concept of immortality is elevated to this eidetic level with thehelp of the concept of indestructibility. Just like it says in the text!These two elements—like the even and the odd or the soul anddeath—are not commensurable with one another. Thus it is alsoclear that one is not capable of taking the other up into itself.Where the one exists, the other cannot exist. Nevertheless, wecould still hold that "one passes away and another takes itsplace." This, however, is cogent only so long as the equal and theunequal (or similarities, like, for instance, fire and the warm) areviewed only as characteristics of something and not as "ideas.**As eidetic relations they are thus something like the concept of theequal or the unequal, which in its being-in-itself is unchangeable,which realizes itself innumerably often in even or odd numbers—just as, according to the genuine Pythagoreans, the immortal soulreturns in new incarnations.

Consequently, the Phaedo, it seems to me, anticipates the cri-tique of the Pythagorean identification of being with mathemat-ics that gets worked out later in the theory of ideas and then findsa clear confirmation specifically in the Philebus' "third kind." Inthe end, the world of ideas is not that other world that exists onlyfor the gods.

Standing behind this, above all, could be the fact that theEleatic conception of being or of the one goes only badly with thetransition into the nothing. The irrepressible desire in humanexperience to overcome the inconceivability of death through thethought of immortality also makes the transition into the nothingseem unthinkable. The interesting thing, therefore, is this conceptof olethros, of downfall,4 "of nothing." It is the concept of

4. des Untergangs


something that—in contrast to death (thanatos), which continu-ally threatens life—does not occur within the experience of, with-in the consciousness of, human beings.

Essentially, the doubleness of the question follows from theambiguity of the concept of the soul, which is taken as both theorigin of life and the seat of thinking. The tension between thesetwo conceptions of the soul becomes a problem. "Thinking" inmathematics and in the dialectic is not the same as "thinking" inthe sense of the methodical procedure of modern science; rather,thinking is present when being is. I mean by this that Plato andAristotle are convinced that without life there is no thinking,without psyche there is no nous, because thinking is nothing butthis presence, and as such it is life. It seems that these twoaspects—life and thought—do not allow themselves to be sepa-rated from each other, and we can also see this in modern philos-ophy insofar as it is just as much a philosophy of life as it is a phi-losophy of consciousness and self-consciousness. As we know,Hegelian phenomenology brings this transformation of the cycleof the living being within the reflexivity of consciousness to pre-sentation. The transposition of life into self-consciousness is fun-damental for all of German idealism.

Furthermore, this problem is found not only in the Phaedobut also in Aristotle. Aristotle states quite clearly in De animawhat already occurs in Plato—albeit in narrative and mysticalform—namely, that the division of the soul into parts does notform an absolute division because the soul is always only one inits vegetative, its affective, as well as its theoretical function. Thisis the mystery, the secret, of the soul, which lies precisely in thefact that it does not consist, as the body does, of various discreteorgans, each individualized according to its function, but ratherit takes effect with intensive concentration in each of its aspects.In light of these considerations, we can understand what meaningthere is in the fact that philosophy wavers back and forth betweenthe beginning in the sense of the origin of life and the beginningof cognition and thinking. This wavering has its ground in thestructure of the human being itself. It is no mere fluctuating mud-dle but a living exchange between the various forms in whichhuman life articulates itself as entelechy.

The conclusion to this problem that Socrates draws in thePhaedo (106d) suggests that what is immortal is also indestruc-tible and that it is the same with the soul as it is with the even,


which, of course, does not become odd but also cannot pass away.To put it another way: in the end it will be conceded that the soulis immortal—and then it must also be admitted that it is inde-structible. For, indeed, both god and the idea of life would then beimmortal as well as imperishable We are no doubt dealing herewith an argument that displays a certain weakness. Indeed, in thefinal analysis the acknowledgment of immortality seems to bebased on approbation. Simmias, however, seems sensitive to thisweakness; yet all doubts are overcome with the assertion that, inany case, it is better to lead an honest life. The most widespreadinterpretation that puts particular emphasis on this passage isthat, ultimately, immortality has really only been proven for theidea of life, for the idea of the soul, not for the indestructibility ofthe discrete individual. This is a problem that runs through theentire history of philosophy. One recalls, for instance, Averroismand the trials of Meister Eckhart and others for heresy. Whatshould we make of this? Should we think that Plato has not rec-ognized the problem and for this reason has proven immortalityonly for the idea of the soul and not proven it for the individualsoul? Here, we come back to a fundamental problem of Platonicphilosophy, a problem that is not thematized, namely, the rela-tionship between universal and particular. Concepts that involvethe immanence of the one in the other develop only within theframework of the subsequent tradition. It is pure Aristotelianismif we ask ourselves what significance there is in Plato for the rela-tionship between the particular, which represents an unquestion-able givenness, and the universal, which we interpret realisticallyor nominalistically. This is a topic that is discussed a great deal inlater philosophy but one that does not occur at all in Plato. Forhim, it is obvious that true essence, true being, announces itself inlanguage and that language is able to reach with words that whichexists. The psyche is not only a universal concept but it is theomnipresence of life and particularly [its presence] in the livingbeing. In truth, what presents itself as a weakness in Socrates'argument confirms that a separation is not possible between theideas and the particular. Incidentally, one further drastic confir-mation could be drawn from the dialogue, Parmenides: it is non-sense to believe that the world of the ideas is only for the gods andthat the world of facts is only for mortals.

All of this is important in order to understand better whatactually lies hidden behind the Platonic dialectic of immortality


and indestructibility in the Phaedo. Of course, the presence ofthe soul in the individual, which is based on self-evidence andnot on arguments, is connected with the religious tradition. Inthe end, Socrates will reach the conclusion that after the onset ofbodily death the soul continues to exist in another place, name-ly, in Hades. At this point, the religious tradition is completelypresent, albeit in a very detached way. The following should benoted here: whereas Socrates asserts (106d) that because of hisimmortality we must admit that "the god" (ho theos) could notperish, his interlocutor replies that this must be admitted of allthe gods (para theon). Now the plurality of the gods certainlybelongs to the religious tradition just as much as the image ofHades does, but here "the god" is tantamount to "the divine,"and this signifies that Plato certainly wants to refer to conven-tional religion but also to a rational concept that confirms it. Byway of explanation, however, I would like to add that this talkof "the god" does not, of course, mean monotheism but some-thing indeterminately divine. As far as this entire thematic is con-cerned, an excellent explanation for why Socrates has reserva-tions about the traditional religion of his city can ultimately bederived from the Euthyphro.

In conclusion, please bear the following in mind: my remarksdemonstrate tendentially that the arguments formulated in thePhaedo for the soul's immortality always tend to develop them-selves within the context of a theoretical deliberation stemmingfrom the ambiguity of the soul's function. It can just as well beconsciousness as the principle of life.

6From the Soul to the Logos:

The Theatetus andthe Sophist

nphe Phaedo, as we saw, is a first step on the path that leadsA from the concept of the soul as the origin of life to the new

Socratic-Platonic orientation toward knowledge and mathemat-ics. In a certain sense, the Theatetus tries to further clarify theproblem of the opposition between the vitalistic and the spiritu-alistic concepts of the soul.

The dialogue begins with the definition of knowledge as ais-thesis or perception (151e). Be careful! Theatetus—a mathemati-cian—is saying here that knowledge is perception. This does notmean he is referring to the function of the senses. We are not deal-ing here with the Aristotelian concept of aisthesis but rather withimmediacy, with a perception that corresponds completely to self-evidence, a perception that mathematics makes use of that is dif-ferent from "mere" argumentation. By way of explanation, weshould point out that the word "mere" here is used in the sensethat it has in the Greek expression "psiloi logoi."1 Theodores ofCyrene says that in his youth he himself engaged in bare ("mere")discourse; later, however, he turned to mathematics, in whichthere is self-evidence. It is thus clear that in this context "percep-tion" means self-evidence hi the sense that "one cannot help butsee." Later, the actual theory of perception formulates it in the

1. "bare words" or "plain words"

From the Soul to the Logos 61

same way, as a collision or encounter with reality (153e). Thistheory is found again in an extremely sophisticated form, indeedin a downright Protagorean form, in Alfred North Whitehead,and also as the only long Plato quotation that occurs in Wittgen-stein (in the Philosophical Investigations). In precisely this pas-sage in the Theatetus, Socrates explicates the theory according towhich perception is a kind of physics and resembles a concur-rence of movements in which the slower movement appears assomething standing, while the faster, in contrast, appears assomething flowing and variable (156d ff.).

As we know, Socrates demonstrates that coming to a stand-still is not possible in this physics of perception. Perception is notmerely physical motion as Empedocles and others understood it.

We are well acquainted with the theory of seeing that stemsfrom Empedocles because Theophrastus has handed down to usthe part of Empedocles' work dealing with this topic. Apparentlythe encounter theory arises for the first time with Empedocles andthen persists until Protagoras. The crucial point of Socrates' argu-ment is that perception is not an encounter between the eyes andwhat is, but rather that, in seeing, the eye is exclusively the organof the soul. Seeing is certainly accomplished with help of the eye,yet it is not the eye that sees (184d). In the course of this train ofthought, Plato brings into play his predecessors, from Heraclitusto Empedocles and Protagoras, although he also names Homerand Epicharmus, and they all are described as proponents of thegeneral flow of things, as though none of them had ever heard ofParmenides. In this respect it must be clearly understood that weare dealing with irony, with imagination, and with a constructionoriginating from the mind of Plato. The concept of that whichflows cannot, in truth, be separated from the concept of thatwhich remains fixed. The one implies the other, as I have alreadystressed in my analysis of the Phaedo, where it came to light thatrecollection and opinion come nearer and nearer to the identicaland the enduring. Specifically in the text of the Theatetus, andthus in its contrast with Protagoras' position, we are dealing withan invention of Plato. It is hard to believe that Mario Unterstein-er included this section of the Theatetus in his collection of theSophists' fragments. It is certainly obvious that this is not Pro-tagoras himself but an interpretation of Protagoras—albeit anextremely refined interpretation that is of great interest for mod-ern philosophy. In essence, we find here once again the problem


of how observation and interpretation of the factual are to beexplained by starting with just the mind.

The Platonic construction shows up clearly in a different pas-sage (180-81), where two positions are placed opposite eachother like two combatants: on the one side, the rheontes, thosewho are for flux and maintain the eternal flux of things, and, onthe other side, the stasiotai, a wordplay designating those who,like "rebels,"2 take a stand on the immobility of that which existsand in this respect are revolutionaries at the same time. Indeed, inthe vernacular "stasiotes" means the same thing as revolutionary,and indeed, as the taking of a stand against the predominant viewof the general flux, when one insists on the identity of being, thepermanent, and the constancy of being, this truly is a revolution.

After it has been shown that knowing cannot be equated herewith sensory perception but rather brings the soul into play, thesecond answer to the question of the essence of knowing assertsthat knowing is doxa, opinion. I will not spend further time onthis very complicated answer because it is essentially coextensivewith the previous one and because the third and last answer is ofparticular interest. This answer states: knowledge is opinionaccompanied by logos. It is rationally established opinion. Withthis we have apparently reached the goal that the whole dialoguestrives toward, namely, to comprehend knowledge as logos. Nev-ertheless the form in which this definition is presented is veryunsatisfactory. Reason is made out to be something additional,something merely added on to opinion, while opinion is alreadythere and is only subsequently verified and confirmed. But this isnot "logos." Logos is not merely the expression of a secure opin-ion, and it is a mistake to comprehend it as mere expression andlinguistically formulated opinion.3

The Tbeatetus thus ends with a theme, /ogos, which this dia-logue does not succeed in adequately defining and which laterstands at the center of the Sophist. In this sense, the conclusion ofthe Theatetus is actually an introduction to the Sophist.

So, let us now take up the Sophistl Here (242c ff.) we find, inlight of our interest in the Presocratics, a quite detailed presenta-tion, something like a doxography, which is also of great signifi-cance for later Aristotelian doxography. Actually, several allusions

2. Aufstaendische, literally, "those who stand up" or "take a stand."3. ausformulierte Meinung


to the Sophist (242c ff.) can be documented in Aristotle. Platopresents the earlier accounts critically as mythical stories.Socrates' conversation partner, the Stranger who has arrived inAthens from Elea, talks about that which is and asserts that, in alllikelihood, everyone who has spoken of this before has just beentelling fairy tales. One person says that there are three kinds ofentities4: three principles that will at one time struggle with eachother and another time unite with each other. We cannot estab-lish to whom the speaker is referring here. Many authors havetried, but to my mind there is no satisfactory solution, and I thinkthis fits into a more general characteristic of the Plato's writings:namely, that precise historical accounts cannot be derived fromthem. At any rate, the Stranger then continues, saying that some-one else has claimed that there is a dual essence: the wet and thedry or the warm and the cold, and these pairs come into a bondwith one other. The third position, he says, is the point of view ofthe Eleatics: Eleatikon ethnos, apo Xenophanous te kai eti pros-then arxamenon. This third position began with Xenophanes andeven earlier. This is a mysterious depiction, and it is certainlywrong to interpret it as evidence for the role of Xenophanes asfounder of the Eleatic school. All of the elements out of whichthis kind of an interpretation is constructed are inadequate: therewas certainly no Eleatic "school," and Xenophanes was not itsfounder. He probably also had very little to do with Parmenides.I am fully aware that this contradicts the doxographical traditionthat goes back to Aristotle. But Plato expresses himself here veryspecifically (kai eti prosthen5), as though the Eleatics had alreadybegun [philosophizing] before Xenophanes. This is, I think, in acertain sense correct. Eleatic philosophy is probably a reply to thefirst philosophical attempts to explain the universe, attempts thatbegan with the Milesians. The true significance of Xenophanes,however, lies elsewhere: he testifies to the shifting interests of anaristocratic society that now interests itself in a new scienceinstead of Homer and Hesiod. Xenophanes was quite simply arhapsodist who recited the texts of the Greek mythology ofHomer and the other poets. Later, in Sicily, where a new societyhad emerged in the mean time, Xenophanes, in his elegant vers-es, treated the cosmos as the divine and showed that these "gods"

4. dreierlei Seiendes5. and those before him


were in reality not the way they were presented in mythology. Inany case, it seems to me that this passage in Plato is not an his-torical source for establishing a Presocratic chronology but has adifferent meaning, as I will demonstrate later.

At the end of the list, the Ionic muses are mentioned, whichevidently means Heraclitus and Empedocles and can also serveas the classic example of a Socratic-Platonic description of theirpredecessors.

Let us now ask ourselves what the entire list means. Appar-ently, it classifies the predecessors according to the number oftheir principles. Accordingly, in the first group there are threeprinciples, in the second group there are two principles, for theEleatics there is only one, and according to Heraclitus and Empe-docles there are the one and the many, which in Empedocles alter-nate with one another while in Heraclitus they form a dialecticalunity. We are dealing, therefore, not primarily with a chronolog-ical order but with a Pythagorean-style logical classification thatis connected in some way to the mystery of numbers.

A new perspective, a reflected perspective follows this classi-fication. The stranger from Elea goes on to say (243a) that thosewho have discussed the number of principles have in each casecontinued on their own way without concerning themselvesabout **us"—about our ability to follow and to understand them.What does this mean? Here, we must establish a relationship tothe beginning of these remarks. It was asserted there that appar-ently the earlier thinkers had only told fairy tales when they spokeof the number of principles. Consequently, we are dealing herewith the difference between a telling of myths, which is commonto all the predecessors, and another access to the problem, whichis now put forward by Socrates' conversation partner. This Eleat-ic conversation partner shows that it is necessary to take a newstep in the reflection. It is above all necessary to understand thesignificance of what is, which in the earliest thinkers had merelybeen presupposed. These thinkers simply tell how existing things6

combine, how they arise, how they connect with one another.They depict all of this as a process, whereas the problem consistsprimarily in comprehending the meaning of being. The dialoguethen proceeds to investigate precisely this problem. For this, it iscrucial that the confrontation over the meaning of being is carried

6. die seienden Dinge


out between two points of view in a manner similar to the dis-pute, described in the fheatetus, between that which flows(rheontes) and that which is permanent (stasiotai).

One of these points of view is the one ascribed to the tradi-tion of the "materialists." Here we need some clarification. Theconcept of "matter" does not occur at all in Plato with the sig-nificance that it has assumed in the tradition. Rather, this is a con-cept introduced by Aristotle. Therefore, as we can also see fromour investigation of Aristotelian texts, it would be extremelynaive of us to now impute the concept of hyle to the Presocratics.We have no citations confirming that the Presocratics had any-thing like the concept of matter. Even Thales' water is somethingother than matter. Moreover, the speech from the passage we justnow examined in the Sophist (246a) speaks only of the peoplewho maintain that only those things exist that can be touchedand handled with the hands, like rocks and tree-trunks, whichclearly alludes to Hesiod's depiction of the Titans' rebellion7

against Mount Olympus (Theogony 675-715). The metaphor ismeant to refer to those who recognize being in the tangible, andthis standpoint is understood in a deeply ontological sense—hence not in the modern sense whereby what can be establishedthrough experience and what can be measured count as "being,"but rather in the sense according which being is dynamis, thus inthe sense of that which produces effects. This is the term withwhose help the philosopher in this context seeks to determine thesense of being that is recognized in the tangible. It is the resistencewith which "being" withstands penetration—somewhat likesolidity in Democritus. We are thus dealing with a dynamic con-cept, and one posited by reason. The dialogue arrives at this con-cept by forcing the "materialists" to admit an irrefutable conse-quence concerning "life"—that, in one way or another, souls andvirtue exist. For we see that they do indeed produce effects: hencethere arises the concept of dynamis.

Likewise, the other party, the "friends of ideas"—perhapsthe Pythagoreans?—cannot, in the final analysis, maintain thatbeing is immovable and unchangeable. It is clear, even with noparticular explanation, that what is cannot be dumb as a post.Therefore, the concept of dynamis applies to both parties, to thatwhich is looked upon as something material as well as to that

7. Aufstand


which is grasped as something psychic. So the contrast betweenwhat flows and what is fixed ultimately proves to be badly con-strued. Even the party of the "friends of ideas," who declareeverything to be fixed and motionless, must admit the necessitythat what is moves. Admittedly, the objects of mathematics andEuclidian geometry know no motion; yet Plato, as a philosopher,rejects the mathematical dogmatism of this standpoint, accord-ing to which being should be immovable, fixed, and so on.Indeed, it is unthinkable to anyone that what exists is, as such,deaf, motionless, and has no nous. This is not the consequenceof a proof but an appeal to a self-evident certainty: that which iscannot make do without life, without motion, without some-thing like nous.

Consequently, we come upon the same problem here as wedid in the Theatetus: the relationship between flux and perma-nence, the same problem, incidentally, that also presented itself inthe Phaedo in form of the soul within the tension-field betweenzoe and nous—between life and mind.8 In the Sophist, this prob-lem is developed with the help of a complex dialectic of the fol-lowing five fundamental ideas: that which exists, motion, rest,sameness, and difference—a series of concepts that contains aconsiderable intellectual demand. How is it possible at all toproperly situate sameness and difference (which, as we know, areconcepts of reflection) alongside motion and rest? In the Hegelianlogic of essence, their function is clear, but with this arrangement,we ask ourselves about the relationship between these reflexiveconcepts and the concepts of motion and rest. Discussing this isextremely difficult, but in the end the following conclusion seemsclear: through the parallel dialectic of the same and the different,the disintegration of the strict alternative also occurs betweenmotion and rest, and, eventually, these two no longer mutuallyexclude each other. The two initial concepts of movement andpermanence develop in that they become, according to the depic-tion in the tenth book of the Nomoi? permanent movement andmoving permanence. In the Sophist, the reciprocity of beteronand tauton is the means by which Plato succeeds in justifying theunity of motion and rest. To be sure, the relationship betweentwo such different pairs of concepts is not completely clear; yet,

8. Geist, spirit9. I.e., Plato's Laws.


as a significant artist, he knows how to make comprehensible thealternating relation of the back and forth between the one and theother. As I see it, Plato realizes how problematic the transition isfrom pure concepts of reflection (to put it in Hegelian terms), thatis, from concepts like identity and difference to conventional andconcrete concepts like motion and rest. Similarly, this also occursin the Timaeus when the sequence of the seasons is described. Itis an image that, just as in the tenth book of the Nomoi, suggeststhe idea that the perdurance of what exists is not excluded by thefact that, as motion, it also participates in temporality.

The goal of the Sophist is neither a merely formal solutionto the aporia nor a compromise between the two opposing the-ses, [a conflict] in which, quite to the contrary, both theses losethe battle. According to Plato's perception, we are really dealinghere with consciousness, with the power of identifying. Think-ing is always identifying, but it is also a self-movement. Think-ing is also always an action, something flowing in time in sucha way that temporality is contained within identity throughout.The fact that all this belongs together with the vision of Platon-ic thought also emerges from the Parmenides, from the well-known paradox of the structure of the moment, the paradox ofbeing time and yet not being in time. This is also an extremelyimportant point for modern thinking. Hegel was the first torevive the problem of the inner contradiction within the tempo-ral concept of the "moment,"10 just as Kierkegaard was the firstto connect this concept with the anxiety of life. Yet, betweenPlato and Hegel/Kierkegaard, there are essentially no documentsthat deal with this problem. I have searched in vain for them;although the problem now and then comes to light casually, asfor example in the Attic Nights, a work from the time of Caesar,in which table conversations of ruling-class sons are described,conversations that are, to all appearances, just pretentious intel-lectual frivolities. Here, we find an allusion to the problem of themoment as it was brought forward in the Parmenides. The ques-tion is raised regarding the moment in which the dying persondies. For, as soon as he is dead, he is no longer a dying man, and,as long as he lies dying, he is not yet dead. We also find an allu-sion to this problem in Pseudo-Dionysius. But all of this, ofcourse, is of no consequence. What counts is to grasp what Plato

10. Augenblick


intended. Undoubtedly this is connected with the ontologicalstatus of the soul, of thinking, or of consciousness. Essentially,this topic runs through the Phaedo, the Theatetus, and theSophist, and it also shows up in the Parmenides, in the problemof the moment investigated there. It is the structure of the soul.In its essence, the contradiction between movement and perma-nence is overcome.

It would be very interesting to discuss the similarity that existsbetween this synthesis of motion and rest, on the one hand, and theself-reflection of modern idealism, on the other. There is a corre-spondence between the transition carried out in Greek philosophyfrom the principle of life to the principle of mind11 and the dialec-tical development in Hegel's Phenomenology and Logic. The prob-lem of the circular, and hence the self-reflexive, structure of Me cor-responds to this as well. It is quite similar. The transition from theidea of life to the particularity of the living individual, as I havealready indicated, is treated by Hegel when in the Phenomenologyhe describes the transition that leads from ever-flowing life to theindividual organism and to self-consciousness. The chapter thatcontains a detailed presentation of self-consciousness is preparedfor by the analysis of the self-relatedness of life. Ultimately, alongwith self-consciousness, self-relatedness, and absolute knowing,Hegel took the Platonic theme of life—the world-soul that ani-mates itself and differentiates itself into various individual organ-isms—and amplified it into absolute spirit, which, in attainingcomplete transparency, leaves behind the limits of human finitude.

Of course, we must be on guard against equating Plato andHegel. If this were indeed the result, we could simply deal direct-ly with Hegel. The problem that fascinates us lies in the distinc-tions between them. Self-reflection, as the autonomous structureof that which is, is actually a standpoint that one attains onlyafter a protracted development of thought. When we study Plato,we should not forget that, with respect to with Hegel, he lies farin the past—but this, of course, holds true for the entire Greektradition. Plato does not base everything on the structure of self-reflection; rather, he describes the relationship between theconcepts of identity and difference, on the one hand, and two dis-tinct dimensions of reality—rest and motion—on the other.

But we must be careful even when we deal with Aristotle. A

11. Geist


Hegelian would say that Aristotle has certainly survived inHegel's Encyclopedia, but with a merely verbal description ofdivine self-reflection. Sure enough, this is what we find in BookA of the Metaphysics, the only text in which the onto-theologi-cal peak of Aristotelian metaphysics is expressly described. Here,the self-movement in self-reflection unfolds toward the com-pletely autonomous form of the First Mover. However, I alsobear in mind that this complete autonomy is nothing human butrather the universe as the Greek thought of it, and therefore weshould consider the difference between the human being and thedivine being. The divine being is distinguished by the continuityof its presence, which is the whole that is. Its superiority lies inthe fact that it knows no limit, no obstruction, no illness, nofatigue, no sleep. In comparison, in the case of the human being,all of these are limitations of its being awake. The finitude of thehuman being brings all this with it. Aristotle himself insists onthe fact that reflection always presupposes an immediate act; itis always a parergon, a subsequently occurring excess that isadded onto something immediate. Reflection presupposesthroughout that we have already submitted to the given in sucha way that—and this is what reflection is—we then turn our-selves back to the given starting point. Besides this, there is stillmuch else connected with the finitude of the human being. Thus,for example, the great mystery of forgetting. The computer issomething impoverished because it cannot forget and therefore isnot creative. Creativity depends on the choices made by our rea-son and our capacity to think.

All of this shows that it is no trivial claim when one thinksthat there is a metaphysics of finitude and finite beings and that,in a certain sense, this "ontology" has been the last word ofGreek metaphysics.

When Hegel takes this up position again, he certainly remainswithin the limits set by the autonomy of self-consciousness thatbelong to a culture founded, in opposition to reality, upon theindependence of the subject which reflects upon itself. It is alsoprecisely this culture from which springs the "aggressiveness" ofmodern science, which always wants to become master over itsobject by means of a method and thus excludes that mutuality ofparticipation existing between object and subject that representsthe highest point of Greek philosophy and makes possible ourparticipation in the beautiful, the good, and the just, as well as in


the values of communal human life. For the Greeks, the essenceof knowledge is the dialogue and not the mastery of objects com-prehended as proceeding from an autonomous subjectivity, thatvictory of modern science that has even in a certain sense led tothe end of the metaphysics. All of this perhaps can perhaps helpus to understand why Husserl, with his analysis of time-consciousness, and, after him, the author of Being and Time,pointed the way for contemporary philosophy.

7Aristotle's Doxographical

Approach

Before we continue our investigation, I would like once againto briefly review the path we have already traveled. Within the

framework of the perspective I have designated as "effective his-tory,"1 we have made well-preserved and unreconstructed textsthe object of our investigation, namely, the writings of Plato andAristotle. We have thereby proceeded from the conviction thatthe beginning of Greek science and philosophy must be graspedfrom the answers that the great thinkers—like, for instance, Platoand Aristotle—have given to the questions raised by this begin-ning. These questions were undoubtedly those of scientific, math-ematical, astronomic, and physical access to what, since Plato, wehave called nature. With this intention, we looked at the Phaedo,and in doing so we had to take note of the fact that it is not pos-sible to understand a fragment of such a well-structured textwithout taking into account the entire movement of thought andthe dialogue conducted between Plato and the past. In this sense,we made the concept of the soul our theme and discussed the soulon the one hand as a life-principle and on the other hand as think-ing and mind. From there we proceeded to the Theatetus and tothe Sophist and examined the passages that deal with the begin-nings of philosophy for the Greeks. In the course of this reflec-tion, I emphasized that "beginning** or "principium" is meanthere not in the temporal sense, but rather in the "logical" senses.

1. Wirkungsgeschichte


The prindpium is that on whose basis everything else is struc-tured, like, for instance, in the domain of numbers, where weknow two first as the number and [then] as n + 1. With this it hasbeen clearly established that even for Plato this beginning lies verymuch in darkness, which follows, for example, from the mannerin which Plato refers to Xenophanes, namely, as the messenger ofa prehistory lying far in the past.

All of this goes to point out once again that even these Platopassages and in general all the passages on which the tradition isbased should not be viewed as documents and testimonies thatinform us in an historically valuable way about the Presocratics.Considered from this point of view, they are extremely unreliableand lead us into error. The chronologies are constructions byscholars of the Hellenistic age, and the "biographies" by Dio-genes Laertius, for instance, are a conglomeration of legends andindirect tradition. This warning also applies to the citations col-lected under the title "Fragments of the Presocratics." These arequotations that at least reflect the interests and the points of viewof the later authors who quoted them.

In the Theatetus and in the Sophist, in the analysis of knowl-edge and of what is, and, likewise, in the Sophist, in the problemof the soul and its relationship to motion and rest, we recognizedthe same problem that had been thematized in the Phaedo withregard to the soul in relation to life and mind.

Now we must proceed to the effect of Presocratic philosophyin the framework of Aristotelian philosophy, that is, we must askhow the Presocratic looks to Aristotelian philosophy. This is anextremely important point because the subsequent doxographysince Theophrastus and his followers leans heavily on Aristotle'stestimonies. Therefore, it is necessary to point out that, with hisexplications of the Presocratics, Aristotle does not wish to writehistory any more than Plato does, but rather he is prompted to doso by problems in his own philosophy. Here, we can assume thatPresocratic philosophy presents a constant challenge for Aris-totelian doctrines and that the passages of the Physics or the Meta-physics dedicated the Presocratics belong to a living dialoguebetween Plato and his predecessors. Only if we follow this dialogueis it possible to understand adequately the question-frame formu-lated by the Milesian, the Eleatic, or the atomistic "schools."

That there is a basic orientation common to Plato and Aris-totle, is clear. Both of them opted for the "flight into the /ogo/,"

Aristotle's Doxographical Approach 73

and, in this sense, they are both followers of Socrates as he is por-trayed in die Phaedo. Then with Hellenism—especially with theStoa—a reestablishing of the origin occurs, which no longer pro-ceeds on the basis of the logoi. But the basic difference betweenPlato and Aristotle is also no less clear: Plato is mathematicallyoriented, while Aristotle sticks to physics and, above all, to biol-ogy. The former orientation largely eliminates the problem ofcontingency because in the realm of mathematics there is nothingat all of the particular. The application of numbers to the partic-ular wants to be nothing other than a practical implementation ofmathematics. But numbers and the relationships between thenumbers are more than mere tools for the construction or thereconstruction of matter. They are the actual bearers of the orderof reality, the regularity of the circular movement of the heaven-ly bodies. Also, in the sublunar world in which the movementsare less regular, there is—as follows from the propagation of thespecies, the rhythm of the seasons, the path from the seed to theripe fruit, and so on—a fixed order. Nevertheless, the orientationtoward physics and biology includes the recognition of the indi-vidual creature, the particular, that which Aristotle calls "todeti" a something that only manifests itself through showing andnot through words. What matters here, obviously, is living natureand its being rather than mathematical structures.

This complex relationship between Plato and Aristotle hasits consequences. They are both concerned with the reality of theuniverse, yet Plato speaks about it mostly with the help of splen-did myths—what is recounted in the Timaeus, for example. Asyou know, the Platonic Timaeus is illuminating in a certain sensefor the integration of Greek philosophy into Christian philoso-phy, insofar as the demiurge is interpreted as an approximationof the Creator-God of the Old Testament. Admittedly, as theword [of the Timaeus} already tells us, the demiurge is like amaster craftsman who does indeed manufacture something butwho, in contrast to the "Word" of the theological doctrine ofCreation, does not simply create from out of nothingness. Thedivine craftsperson manufactures things according to the modelof ideas, of which he is not at all the creator. Here it is clear thatthe model that governs the action of the demiurges conformsmore to the mathematics of Pythagorean astronomy. The demi-urge fashions the world-soul, but what does it have to do withthis soul? It is neither life-principle nor knowledge, but rather


the origin of the periodic, regular, always constant motion thatis the mark of the heavenly bodies and whose essence can beexpressed by numbers and their relationships. If we want to useAristotelian terminology here, it is not so much a question ofphysis but rather of techne, which obviously does not mean tech-ne in the modern sense of technology but intellectual2 creation asit was understood prior to the emergence of modern technology.For the Greeks, techne is a knowing how one fabricates some-thing, not the fabrication itself.

Aristotle apparently did not feel comfortable with this expla-nation of nature by means of images like that of the craftsperson,the technikos. This construction, rather, is the opposite of physis,and I would remind you that the concept of physis has developedonly recently from the self-evident usage within the Western tra-dition into counter-concepts like nomos and techne. But thesecounter-concepts to physis are typically sophistic. Its clear, in anycase, that Aristotle was not content with myths and images, andas he was occasionally prone to making quite blunt judgments, heflatly stated that the Timaeus brings only empty metaphors, matit contains nothing conceptually consistent and is without valuefor the philosopher, who, of course, wants to explain things withconcepts. The universe for Aristotle, indeed, as for Plato, appearsto be founded on mathematical regularities, but this is preciselywhy the universe is not at all similar to the world that is regulat-ed by politics, society, and laws. By contrast, all of this becomesfor Plato the object of a mythical tale. According to Plato, theworld is designed by a sovereign craftsperson-god, yet it is imple-mented in its details by subordinate deities who are responsiblefor what is irregular and accidental in our earthly lives. Onlyheaven is perfect. Aristotle transforms this Platonic myth intoconcepts that constitute the essence of physis. Such concepts are:matter, the origin of motion, form, function,3 time, space, and soon. These are the concepts of techne; they are concepts withwhich the action of the craftsperson can be described; and theyare precisely the kind of concepts with which Aristotle undertakesto determine the specific essence of nature. This should not sur-prise us. Greek civilization had reached such a level by thattime—the epoch of rhetoric and sophistic dialectic—that the

2. Geistig: mental or spiritual.3. Or purpose: Zweck.


skillful craftsperson was regarded as a model for humankind andall human knowledge was regarded as techne. Thus the conceptsconnected to techne were those most readily available forexpressing the order of the world to which Aristotle attachedsuch importance.

Before we continue, it is necessary to point out that the Aris-totelian doctrine of the four causes was not constructed in orderto establish a metaphysics. Rather, the chapter on the four causeswas originally a chapter of the Physics, and this, in turn, was cer-tainly not the first subject in the framework of Aristotle's lecturecourses, nevertheless it undoubtedly belonged to his earliest writ-ings. Exactly when the Physics was worked out remains a verydifficult problem. Apparently, the text had already been partiallywritten earlier, before it was enlarged and received the shape inwhich we know it today.

Let us now begin with an examination of the Physics. This isa text in which (much as in the Metaphysics) the thought is notpresented in a finished and systematic form but rather as some-thing in development, and it is a text that is dictated above allwith the intention of emphasizing his difference from Plato andfrom the Academy, even when Aristotle, by way of elucidation,presents the thinking of his predecessors. This objective of thewhole is clear from the first book on, and this book is essentiallya critique of Plato. This should not surprise us. In the compari-son employed here, the previously suggested difference comes tolight, the difference, that is, that existed between Plato, the math-ematician and Pythagorean, on the one hand, and Aristotle, thephysicist, biologist, and doctor's son, on the other. In this firstbook, we come upon a classification of principles that is less com-plicated than the enumeration that occurs in the Sophist. The sec-ond and third chapter of the first book subsequently contain adetailed criticism of Parmenides and Eleatic philosophy, withinwhich he first makes the quite illuminating remark that inphysics, the science of moving things, there is no place for theEleatics since they completely deny the existence of motion. Thiscriticism of the Eleatics is actually a criticism of Plato. It impliesthat the attempt to determine the various meanings of being, ofwhat is, and so on, is an extremely complicated task and is notlimited to physis. Remarkably, it becomes at no place clear inthese two chapters that the longer and now lost second part ofParmenides' famous poem was preoccupied with nature, the


cosmos, and the self-moving heavenly bodies. The critique focus-es exclusively on the first part of the Parmenidean didactic poem,which has survived through the transcription of Simplicius. Sim-plicius thought (apparently not altogether unjustly) that only thefirst part needed to be transcribed because the Aristotelian cri-tique was aimed only at this first part. But this means that Aris-totle really attacked Plato's point of view by way of a detourthrough the text of Parmenides. To put it another way: in thePhysics—that is, in a book that occupies itself with nature—Aris-totle only goes into that part of the Parmenidean poem that doesnot confront nature. In essence, he thus had the intention of dif-ferentiating himself from Plato, whose views he simply identifiedwith the first part of the poem.

The fourth chapter goes into the experts on nature (physikoi),whom he sometimes calls physiologists and at several other timeshe calls physicists. There is no established terminology here. Inany case it is clear that we are dealing with designations thatencompass all the preceding thinkers—except for the Eleaticsand, to some extent, the Pythagoreans and Plato.

The text states that there are two types of experts on nature:the ones who declare that things can originate through puknotesand manotes, that is, through condensing and rarefying, as well asthe ones who declare that they come about with the help of ekkri-sis, that is, by separating them out from a mixture. Puknotes/manotes and ekkrisis are obviously two distinct theories, and theclassification of the nature experts is based on this difference.

Aristotle attaches no names to puknotes/manotes, yet it isreadily understood that he refers above all else to Anaximenes,who advocated the doctrine that the basic element is air, whichcould assume many different shapes through condensing and rar-efying. (Here, by the way, I am convinced that Thales also hadsomething similar in mind.) Puknotes/manotes apparently standsfor the class that Aristotle ascribes to the Milesians.

The second concept, the concept of ekkrisis, is no doubtintroduced to make explicit reference to Anaximander, Empedo-cles, and Anaxagoras. But what immediately stands out in thisclassification is that the first of these authors seems to have beenbrought together with the two others by force. Ultimately, the dis-course in the text is only about Anaxagoras, and this in a mannerthat makes it clear that mixing and separating out form the modelthat first proves to be necessary on the basis of the Eleatic critique


of the multiplicity and changeability of the processes of nature. Inorder to reply to this criticism, there is nothing left but to fallback on those concepts of mixture and separation (ekkrisis). Thisis a well-known Aristotelian thesis that is repeated in many pas-sages, and I find it quite understandable that, in the end, the cor-puscle theory was held to be an answer to the Eleatic critique. Butsince this is the case, it becomes impossible to proceed in an Aris-totelian manner and to accommodate Anaximander within theframework of this theory. To do so would be to anticipate the"effect" of the Eleatic critique, and thus we would be committingan anachronism comparable to the one that we ran into withXenophanes in the Sophist (242d 4-7). In truth, it seems thatAnaximander's theory is superimposed here on the philosophy ofAnaxagoras. This superimposition, of course, must have had abasis in the tradition. This also emerges from Theophrastus, forexample, who, as Diels has proven, ascribes to Anaximander acosmogony based on the bursting of an originary cosmic egg,hence a cosmogony based on the idea of liberation and differen-tiation. Aristotle obviously knew this tradition, which inclinedhim to ascribe the corpuscle theory to Anaximander as well. Thisarrangement, by the way, seemed so obvious that modern philo-sophical historiography has also fallen in line with it. The Vien-nese school of Gomperz and his supporters as well as the earlyDilthey speak quite similarly in this regard. Essentially, it alwayscomes down in the end to the fact that one thinks this condens-ing as a compression of countless particles. This, of course,should only be seen as an image that imposes itself through theinfluence of Galilean mechanics.

However, if we put ourselves into the culture of the fifth cen-tury before Christ, the picture looks different. It seems obvious tome, for example, that in Anaximenes it is a question of attribut-ing becoming, with all its different appearances, to the same sub-stratum. What is crucial is thus flexibility or changeability. Froman Aristotelian perspective this means that here, of course, theorigin of motion is still not at all developed. Air is simply mov-able and cannot exist in the condition of rest. Aristotle himselfsays that element of earth is entirely absent in the Milesiansbecause earth lacks flexibility. In these earliest theories, therefore,the problem of the material cause does not come into considera-tion at all, or at least not primarily; here, rather, the question isthe problem of motion's origin. Thus it seems to me completely


misguided to maintain, following Aristotle, that first water andthen air were proposed as principles and that they were each pro-posed in the sense of a material substance. No, here, we are deal-ing with something else, namely, the changeability of things andnot elements. This was also the decisive point with Anaximander,only that his cosmogony looks suspiciously similar to that ofAnaxagoras, which for me is the reason [for thinking] that it hasperhaps has been mixed in with Aristotle. In the end, Anaximan-der even falls into complete oblivion, while Anaxagoras is spokenof extensively. With this we have a further example of what I havealready brought to light, namely, that we usually get to know thephilosophy of the earliest thinkers through the figure of a thinkerfrom Socrates' time. In this case, it is the figure of Anaxagoras.

We observe the same problem with regard to Thales. In theMetaphysics, Aristotle says with subtle reservation that the thesisput forward by Thales, namely, that water is the originary element,follows from die observation that there is no life without moisture.This does not correspond to the sixth-century cosmological-cosmogonic way of thinking. This time period would be morelikely to maintain that other assertion by Aristotle, the one thatconcluded that water was valid as the originary element becausea log always stays at the surface and is carried by water. Obvi-ously, this observation is entirely in accord with Greek argu-mentation and has nothing to with the telling of myths. Actual-ly, that the **fundamentality"of water should be demonstratedby4 the fact that the log climbs again and again to the surfacewhenever one tries to submerge it is an extraordinary observa-tion. This argument appears plausible to me. Perhaps it is theonly one that really corresponds to Milesian thinking. The otherone, which accepts water as the principle of life, presupposes adevelopment of biology and medicine that had not yet takenhold at the time of the Thales cosmology and that only pushes[its way] into consciousness in the fifth century. Thus the con-clusion is that there may be a superimposition on the part of thefifth century present in this case as well, specifically on the partof Diogenes of Apollonia, as follows from the investigations by

4. The logic of the German here appears to have been inverted fromwhat was originally intended. The German reads more literally as follows:"In fact, in that the 'fundamentality' of water should prove that [beweisensoil, dafi] the log climbs again and again to the surface whenever one tries tosubmerge it is an extraordinary observation."


John Burnet and Andre Laks.5 This is another instance, as I seeit, in which the doxography of the Presocratic theme is stronglystamped by the fourth century, and the doxographer here is noless than Aristotle himself. Of course, these are not conscious fal-sifications by Aristotle; rather, it comes down to the fact that theprecision of the information and the variations between this andthat philosopher had no particularly great significance for Aris-totle since he was more interested in the problems themselves.And if we study the Presocratics as philosophers on the basis ofthe writings of Aristotle, we must refer to Aristotle's interestsrather than believing, in accordance with the desires of modernhistorical research, that here we have a fragmentary tradition todecipher and appraise historically.

Now I would like to call attention once again to the reasonswhy the texts of Plato and Aristotle are reviewed again and again.We must begin from the fact that a gap exists between the inten-tion and the conceptual apparatus. This has been the startingpoint for the manner in which I have treated Plato and Aristotle.Both of them are well acquainted with the distinction betweenintention and conceptual work. This is also the reason why in theSophist the theories of the Presocratics are smiled at like myths;they do not quite succeed in adequately clarifying the concept ofthat which is that Parmenides introduced. In Aristotle, the con-cept of hyle (wood, forest) seemed to be crucial for the formationof such a concept of what is precisely because wood was such agenerally available raw material. It turns out once again that thisconcept belongs less to nature than to the world of techne. Thisis probably die reason Aristotle uses the more precise expression"hypokeimenon" in order to gain a grasp of the object of theinvestigation—that is, a grasp of becoming in nature: insofar asthere is change, there must be a substratum of this change, but innature it may not be "material."

Basically, our discussion is trying to show that we are stand-ing here at the origin of doxography. Yet, at the same time, thisorigin is a distortion of the true intentions of the first thinkers ofthe West. For example, when Aristotle begins to speak in theMetaphysics of the first conception of cause and says that Thales

5. See Burnet's The Greek Philosophers, revised ed. (London, 1982)and Early Greek Philosophy, 4th ed. (London, 1930) and Laks' Diogene d'Apollonie (Lille, 1983).


proposed this and that Thales was the first thinker who did notsimply recount myths but also made use of evidence, then wemust understand that by 'cause' he meant matter. Subsequentdoxography was deeply influenced by this interpretive approach.Water, then, essentially signifies a material element, and the samealso happens with some violence to the apeiron of Anaximanderand then to the air of Anaximenes. In this way, the image of a"school" is developed around a common theme standing in thecenter, and, as we know, from this image later emerges the embar-rassment that Anaximenes' air appears to be a setback in com-parison with the indeterminate of Anaximander (which cannotpossibly be a material!), even though by the "school" of Miletusmost people mean the people around Anaximenes. All of this isapparently a consequence of the concepts that Aristotle mustintroduce in order to overcome the mathematical and mythicalview of the Timaeus. But at the same time it is dear that Aristo-tle is not convincing here, and this is why I have begun with thePhysics, in which the Milesians are depicted in a completely dif-ferent way: there, Anaximander is situated quite differently inrelation to Thales and Anaximenes, such that they can both beconceived of as expounding the ideas of the condensing, the flex-ibility, and the changing of things.

Even in Plato we clearly observed the lack of a conceptualityappropriate to his intentions. We have seen what pains Platotakes in this respect to reach purely formal and logical conceptslike sameness/difference from the conceptual pair of rest/motion.This is not, of course, meant to be a criticism. After making theformalism of the fourfold Aristotelian conception of cause one'sown, one is inclined to judge Plato's endeavors as incomplete. No,the problem is a different one. It is a question of gleaning theattainments of ancient knowledge and the power of its imagina-tion from the use of concepts. We have a similar example [today].An advance in the philosophy of our own century is the insightinto the preschematization [involved] in the use of phenomeno-logical concepts and their horizons of meaning. When Heideggeranalyzes the concept of consciousness, for example, he makesclear that the use of that concept presupposes being as presence-at-hand.6 Now it is clear that a philosophical tradition begins toenter into the conversation here as soon as the concepts it

6. Vorhandenheit


employs are no longer taken up as something self-evident, if theexertion of thinking is directed toward bringing to speech die dis-cernable implications of conventional concept usage.

This is precisely what happens when Aristotle situates hiscritical position over against Plato's mathematical-Pythagoreancosmology. The doctrine of the four causes, as I have already said,is, above all else, the conceptual basis of Aristotle's Physics as itdevelops. This permits him to reject the myth told in the Timaeusand to overcome the mathematical conception of physis. By con-trast, the Aristotelian concept of the causes allows the world ofwhat is handcrafted to step into the foreground.

The salient point of this doctrine remains the concept of thematerial cause. The Greek word is "hyle"—that is to say, forestor wood—an expression that loudly proclaims its descent fromthe world of the craftsperson, while many corresponding Latinconcepts came from the world of the farmer. What is importantabout the material cause as such? For the craftsperson, matter isobviously not the substance of his action but only its sine quanon. The material is indispensable, yet it is completely dependenton the choice and execution of the plan. In any case, the matterdoes not acquire the design on its own. When Aristotle firstspeaks of nature, he must state expressly that it is something thatcontains the beginning of its movement, that is, the principle ofits development, in itself. Matter, on the other hand, in no waycontains its development in itself; indeed one can define it direct-ly as that which does not possess this quality. "If one sticks apiece of wood into the ground," says the Sophist, Antiphon, "notree grows from it," and Aristotle quotes him approvingly. Thefirst thing that we must comprehend is thus that matter has noautonomous function and is something completely different fromnature. Certainly, it is a something, it is ousia pos, in a certainsense a thing that exists.7 In another sense, however, it is some-thing that does not exist.8 That is, if we understand matter to besomething determinate—like, for example, the paper on which Iwrite—then this "material" is already more than matter. It isquadrilateral, white, and so on; that is, it is itself already a prod-uct because it has a form and a purpose and is available for use.In a certain sense, matter does not exist; it does not exist, that is,

7. einSeiendes8. etwas Nichtseiendes


if "existing" means "being" as in "being here."9 If I point tosomething as material, I certainly do not mean it as matter butalready as something shaped, structured, a product of techne. Butthen, how is it with nature, if, like Aristotle, we exclude the workof a creator? As Aristotelian science was transformed at thebeginning of modern science, in order to bring the technical toneof the matter concept closer to "nature" the concept of matter inthe Presocratics came to be expressed with the help of hylozoism.But even this concept is little more than a metaphor that cannotsolve the problem of the essence of nature in the form in whichthis problem is posed by Aristotle's Physics. It is obvious thatmatter is not what distinguishes nature. The crucial thing is theprinciple of motion, the hothen he kinesis. Granted, Aristotleemphasizes the fact that matter is indispensable. This emphasisfollows from the fact that he is an opponent of Pythagorean-Platonic mathematism. In order to defend his own point of view,he must lean on the material cause. The problem arises as soon asit becomes necessary to determine conceptually which properfunction the material cause fulfills in reality. The answer thatAristotle finds [however] has a certain ambiguity within Aris-totelian philosophy. This expression, "hypokeimenon," is some-thing "nameless" that forms the substratum of all qualitativealteration, but it can also mean the subject of the sentence. Themeaning of "hypokeimenon" is purely functional: the underlying,the substrate. The word "substantia" is nothing other than thecategorial and grammatical translation of this word into Latin.

9. Hiersein

8Ionic Thinking inAristotle's Physics

A ristotelian terminology can already be distinguished in Plato.x\Toward the beginning of the Philebus, Socrates—in fact, anextremely mature Socrates—says that there are four kinds ofthings: the first is the unlimited, the second is limit, the third is thelimited, and the fourth is mind,1 which accomplishes the limiting.This connects with the Pythagorean tradition, that is, to the rela-tionship that obtains between the apeiron (the undetermined, theunlimited) and the peras (the limit). Thus number is what elimi-nates unlimitedness and therefore constitutes the essence of thingsthrough die knowledge of number. But for the Pythagoreansnumber becomes being itself. In the things themselves,2 Plato seesa third thing, the real, and this is the third kind. Above all else,Plato speaks of a fourth cause: mind, which brings about this lim-itation. With both of these, we have gone beyond the Pythagore-an tradition. Precisely by further differentiating this tradition,Plato gives to wows, to die intellectual,3 its true essence, whichproduces the synthesis between the unlimited and the limit.

As I see it, the difference between Plato's standpoint and Aris-totle's position is therefore clear: Aristotle sees the substratum ofchange in the hyle, Plato sees it in the indeterminate, in the moreor the less (mallon kai hetton), or even in the large and the small

1. Geist: nous in die Greek.2. in der Sache selbst3. dem Geistigen


(mega kai mikron), therefore in a mathematically, that is to say,an idealistically conceived substratum that eventually becomessomething through number. Of course, Plato is aware of the factthat the problem consists in explaining the transition that leadsfrom the indeterminate to the determination of the things ofnature, that is, to physis. Thus he comes to distinguish wows,mind, which accomplishes the determination in that it unifies theunlimited with the limit as a particular kind. This is the fourthfactor that is necessary in order to overcome the strictly numeri-cal scheme of the Pythagoreans.

Yet in this respect, in Aristotle's eyes the demiurge is nothingmore than a meaningless metaphor, a poetic image of Plato's thatsuggests a mind dominating reality. But the concept is missing. Sohe asks how concrete, determinate being comes to be in nature.This is the problem of the origin, of haplei genesis. With this,since all becoming presupposes something that was previouslynot there, the question of the possibility of becoming arises. Ifbecoming must be explained without recourse to a mythicalcraftsperson, the question poses itself as to how this is legiti-mately possible without thinking the unthinkable nothing. To thisquestion, Aristotle responds that there could not be nothing.

This is an interesting point. Here Aristotle apparently consid-ers the Eleatic argument that rejects every use of the nothing (meon) in that he introduces his own concepts, which are moreappropriate for natural beings,4 for which motion is suitable as adistinguishing characteristic. Aristotle employs for this the term"deprivation" (steresis), privation. This means, for example, thatthe transition from cold to warm is thus explained by the fact thatone grasps the cold as a lack of the warm and not as somethingthat an authoritative external action must accomplish, like, forinstance, the craftsperson who takes the material and endows itwith a new form. The concept of steresis is the Aristotelian solu-tion to the problem of genesis. With this concept, as we know, theconcepts of dynamis and energeia come into play, that is, the con-cepts of potential and actual being. These concepts are found notonly in the Metaphysics but also in the sixth and eighth chaptersof the Physics and elsewhere in the early writings. In this way,Aristotle gains the possibility of solving the contradiction inher-ent in the concept of motion and thus getting at the dialectical

4. das naturlicbe Seiende

Ionic Thinking in Aristotle's Physics 85

problem of the unity of rest and motion that we already found inthe Sophist. Already in Plato, dynamis opens a new ontologicalperspective: a concept of what is that does not grasp this as some-thing present—as static and permanent givenness—but as some-thing that is motion and leads to motion. In the Aristotelian con-ceptual pair of dynamis and entelecheia, being and motion nolonger stand in opposition to one another.

All of this means that Aristotle takes up certain standpointswith regard to the explanation of the concrete and the contingent,standpoints that constitute a conscious opposition to thePythagorean approach and its mythical aberrations, and he there-by presents an opposition to Plato's divine craftsperson. Thisview of physis in Aristotle points toward his "doxography." Italso explains the inconsistency of the tradition according towhich Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes stand in such anillogical sequence. In Aristotle, there is no such sequence amongthem. As Aristotle himself says, Anaximander's theory can onlybe associated with those who take the separating of what is mixedas a basis. Because the conceptual pairing of "separating/themixed" is a different one from the pairing, "condensing/dissolv-ing," we can conclude that Anaximander, according to Aristotlein the Physics, cannot be associated with the same group asAnaximenes. It is obvious, therefore, that Aristotle acts quitesummarily in the Metaphysics when he classifies all three Mile-sians together under the fundamental idea of the material causeand thereby distorts Anaximander's position in particular. This iswhy it is necessary to ask ourselves what Aristotle really thoughtabout the lonians.

In regard to Thales, I have already explained that the mater-ial cause was not his real problem. As the Phaedo confirms, theproblem for Thales, according to Aristotle, consists in the factthat the whole rests upon water like the piece of wood that comesto the surface again and again when one pushes it under. We referto this whole with an extremely subtle expression that is indica-tive of something unitary and oriented toward unity: the "uni-verse." This is apparently the only information about Thales thatAristotle really possessed, which is also confirmed by the fact thatthe view ascribed to Thales—that water is the originary elementsince it represents the nourishment of living beings—is expresslycharacterized in the text only as a supposition. In reality, this ismore of a fourth-century opinion that derives from Diogenes of


Apollonia. In truth, the Aristotelian sources themselves testify toonly a single theme from Thales, namely, the question regardingthe way in which the universe rests on water.

But how do things stand with Anaximander? Let us first dealwith the famous epigram to which Heidegger, as we know, dedi-cated an extremely profound essay but which has also been verycarefully analyzed by classical philology with highly interestingresults. I mean the following famous passage, which is quoted bySimplicius: archen eireche ton onton to apeiron (Physics 24,13 .̂Here, of course, the word "arche" means nothing more than"beginning" in the temporal sense. It would be an anachronism ifone wanted to interpret Anaximander as though he had intendedthe metaphysical meaning of a "principle" from which somethingis derived. If "arche" refers to apeiron, the meaning is clear: "Theunlimited is at the beginning of the whole." Here, I would like torecall that Werner Jaeger discusses the infinity chapter of Aristo-tle's Physics in an excellent footnote of his Theology of the EarlyGreek Thinkers. The correct path is taken there, a path that Imyself likewise walk in that I proceed from the Aristotelian con-cepts of the Physics.

The text continues: ex hdn de he genesis esti tots oust, kai tenphthoran eis tauta ginesthai kata to chreon. This, too, is a well-known formulation: "There, where existing things have their origin,their becoming, there passing away also takes place." "Phthora" isa very suggestive expression for this, which I could also render as"dissolution." Again and again I place great value on these ques-tions of lexical significance because in them we have the life ofphilosophy: we speak with the help of words, and in order to beunderstood as expressions of thought the words must be graspedin terms of both their original meanings and their respective con-texts. So this means here that, of necessity, the dissolution alwaysfollows: didonai gar auta diken kai tisin allelois tes adikias kataten tou chronou taxin. I remind you once again of the interpreta-tion of this famous saying, stemming from Schopenhauer andbased the Upanishads, that Nietzsche formulates in his treatise onPhilosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. At that time it wasread as: "Existing things5 pay the price for the offense that theycommitted by breaking away from the whole and becoming indi-viduals." This interpretation, however, cannot be maintained

5. Die seienden Dinge


because meanwhile the word [for] "each other" ("allelois") hasbeen found in the text as recorded by Simplicius. This means thatexisting things suffer the penalty and produce atonement for eachother. It is no wonder that the older interpretation was support-ed by a text in which the word "each other" is missing. The truthis—and this is particularly valid since the restoration of the text—that the meaning of the passage handed down by Simplicius is acompletely different one and definitely has nothing to do with the"Buddhism" upon which Schopenhauer's metaphysics is based.Provided we do not delete the term "each other" but pay properattention to it, we realize that it refers to oppositions (enantia),hence to the opposites and their reciprocal relationship. But thenAnaximander's formulation amounts to nothing more than bal-ance, the permanent equilibrium that exists in the universe, andto the fact that each prevailing tendency is always superseded6

again by an opposite tendency. Consequently, the purpose ofAnaximander's aphorism is obviously to express the natural bal-ance between phenomena. Heidegger's essay can likewise be stud-ied profitably in light of this textual emendation.

One last point about this text: it has also been proposed thatthe words kata ten tou chronou toxin ("in accordance with thetemporal order") are an interpretive addition by Simplicius. Thisthesis, originating with Franz Dirlmeier, seems plausible to me,and for this reason I do not find entirely convincing Jaeger's sup-position that Anaximander has borrowed from the Ionic pollsand its order the image of Time enthroned on his chair as a judgewho lays down penalties. There is indeed nothing of this in Anax-imander. It is merely an added interpretation, albeit an interpre-tation that comes from someone whose interpretation is alwaysworth considering. This interpreter knows that the myth aboutthe bursting of the cosmic egg stands at the origin of Anaximan-der's cosmogony. This also justifies the Aristotelian intuitionaccording to which Anaximander's view is not based on the ideaof condensing/rarefying enunciated by Thales and Anaximenes,but rather on the separation of the mixed.

That Thales and Anaximenes may be construed as similarshould be clear. Water and air really are subject to the changes indensity and composition. But that Anaximander should have hisplace between the water and the air and in such a way that

6. verdrangt


Anaximenes appears as a step backwards in relation to Anaxi-mander is totally absurd. Indeed, the fact that Anaximenes wasconsidered to be the head of the school also speaks against this.Aristotle speaks of hoi peri Anaximenen. It is Anaximenes who isregarded as representative of the Milesian thinkers. Accordingly,it is out of the question that Anaximenes should not have com-prehended the depth of the concept of the indeterminate, the ape-iron, which Anaximander coined. In truth, the whole difficultystems from a misunderstanding of the word "apeiron," whichmust have another meaning here besides that of indeterminatesubstance. Moreover, as I see it, the interpreter who added thewords kata ten ton chronou taxin had recognized this. He prob-ably realized, similarly to Anaximander, that a periodic motioncontinues without limit and without end. The apeiron is actuallythat which has neither beginning nor end, in that it comes backinto itself again and again like a loop. This is the miracle of being:the motion that regulates itself constantly and progressively intothe infinite. This, it would seem, is the true beginning of existingthings. Heidegger has established precisely this decisive point,namely, the idea that temporality is the key characteristic of thatwhich is. But can this view of the periodicity of being be broughtinto harmony with the word "apeiron"? This problem solvesitself if we understand the opening words—archen ton onton toapeiron—as, in a certain sense, a paradoxical formulation whatmay certainly not be taken literally. But this is precisely what hasbeen done by the doxography that considers that, since the archemust either be something finite or something infinite, it is plausi-ble to understand Anaximander's apeiron as infinite substance.Formulated schematically and a little provocatively, I would liketo suggest that, for existing things, the beginning consists in thefact that they have no beginning because what exists preservesitself in its continual periodicity.

Admittedly, we know that this line of reasoning is not car-ried out in Anaximander. But the view according to which theuniverse is a balanced self-turning necessarily raises the ques-tion of what actually preceded this perpetual balance of things.There is an answer to this. It lies in the new cosmogonic mythosthat is being told at this time. It is the myth of the bursting ofthe cosmic egg. Through recent research, we have proven thatthe cosmogonic myths of the East stand behind this view, espe-cially the myths of the Hittites and the Sumerians. As we know,


a confrontation has also arisen over the question of how farthese cosmogonies extend: does Anaximander have in mind acosmogony in the sense that it always periodically repeats itself,such that multiple universes hatch from cosmic eggs? Certainly,the multiplicity of universes is asserted. But along with this, wewould be accepting the fact that Anaximander is superimposedon Empedocles as well as Democritus. In their century, it isindeed possible to abstract from sense perception to such anextent that one reaches the assumption that periodicity means anew formation of a cosmos each time a new order is broughtabout through the bursting, the determination, and the struc-turing of all things, and then in each case a process of dissolu-tion and a new bursting follows upon all this. Such an interpre-tation does not accord with the explanation that, in my ownview and those advocated by other authors, corresponds to thetestimonies about Anaximander. For, after all, our attentionshould be directed to the reciprocal equilibrium of the variousexisting things in the one universe. After evidence was producedthat the language used by Anaximander expresses no mysticreligiosity of a Buddhistic sort according to which individual-ization is regarded as an offense that must be expiated by apenalty, Werner Jaeger, in particular, showed that Anaximan-der's language is the language of the city-state, the language ofthe law that holds sway in the city, and that we are dealing herewith the social and political balance of the city. Even though, asI have already said, I would not like to go as far as Jaeger,according to whom Anaximander supposes the image of Timeto be a judge enthroned on his chair, it is nevertheless clear tome that Anaximander's language goes back to political lan-guage, to the language of the city-state with its order and itsinstitutions. But for precisely this reason I consider it unlikelythat one can ascribe to Anaximander the idea of the multiplici-ty of universes. It is much more plausible that a later superim-position occurred, similar to the one that is responsible for theidea of moisture being Thales* concept of the originary elementwhen, in fact, it originates from a superimposition by Diogenesof Apollonia and his contemporaries.

With regard to Anaximenes, I would like to restrict myself tothe remark that he is the first one whose method has been irrev-ocably handed down as what passed at that time for a "proof."Think, for instance, of the "proof* for the condensation of


being—that, because of compression and condensation, whenone's mouth is closed the air is cold, and, because of rarefaction,when one's mouth open it is warm. We may smile at the naiveteof this "proof," yet its importance lies in the fact that it wants toproduce a proof, albeit an extremely ridiculous one, that is found-ed on the observation of things, a procedure that may have beentypical of the thinkers of that time.

In conclusion, the following result can be formulated: amongthe three names that are passed on to us as members of the so-called school of Miletus, there is an obvious commonality of ori-entation. The same problem poses itself in each case—in Thaleswith water, in Anaximander with the periodicity of the universe,and in Anaximenes with air—all of which we can formulate byresorting to the conceptuality developed in Aristotle's Physics,for which we employ the concept of physis. What is new aboutwhat these thinkers bring to light is precisely this: it has to dowith the problem of physis, with something that endures inbecoming and in the multiplicity of appearances. What lendsthese thinkers unity and what causes them to appear as the firststage of Greek thinking is their willingness to separate them-selves from mythos and to express the thought of an observablereality that carries itself and orders itself in itself. This attemptcan be described aptly within the framework of the conceptuali-ty of Aristotle's Physics.

My viewpoint can be corroborated further by evidence drawnfrom the elegies of Xenophanes. Xenophanes was, as you know, arhapsode who, just as Pythagoras had, emigrated from AsiaMinor to southern Italy after the Persian occupation of his home.This was an exceedingly important event, the beginning of a newchapter in Western thinking. Xenophanes has left us an extreme-ly fascinating trail. Certainly, he was no thinker, and he was alsonot the founder of the Eleatic school, which apparently did noteven exist. The Eleatic school is probably the invention of a later,school-happy age. In the eyes of schoolmasters everythingbecomes a school. But the enormous importance of Xenophanesnow lies precisely in the fact that he was something entirely dif-ferent. He was a rhapsode, an elocutionist who was trained torecite the great epic poetry. His own elegies have been praisedbecause, instead of telling us about titans, giants, and centaurs,they deal with virtues, and he expressly puts forward as improperthe singing of athletic achievements and victories in competition.


The highest things are of a different kind—namely, education andknowledge—and these alone should be honored and celebrated.This is a testimony of extraordinary value, even if here we do nothear the voice of the philosopher but rather that of the rhapsode.

But there are also some aphorisms by Xenophanes that are ofphilosophical interest, like, for instance, fragments 23 to 28 of theDiels/Kranz edition. The following sentence stands at the begin-ning of these fragments: eis theos, en te theoisi kai anthopoisimegistos, outi demos thnetoisin homoiios oude noema, whichmeans roughly: "Lone god, the greatest among the gods and peo-ple, similar to mortals neither in form nor in insight." (Here onecould criticize the fact that the formulation "Lone god, the great-est among the gods and people" contains a contradiction. Butwhoever said this was meant to be a logical treatise?) What isreally going on with this lone god? We find the answer in the fol-lowing fragments: all' apaneuthe ponoio noou phreni pantakradainei ("with the help of his nous he rules the whole"), andaiei d' en tautoi mimnei kinoumenos ouden ("always he remainsin the same place without moving"). This last distinct sentencehas come to be of momentous importance, for Xenophanes hasbeen put forward as the founder of the Eleatic school because ofit, since, by positing the One as the unmoved, he denies motion.Against this, I take it to be obvious that these lines allude to thesame problem that the Milesians also debated: it is the whole, theuniverse, that carries itself and corresponds to the globe swim-ming on water, or the periodicity of the world, or the airdescribed by Anaximander that endures alternating condensationand rarefaction. With this, everything becomes clear. The lonegod, the new god, is what we call the universe. This is the onlything that exists. For the Greeks, "god" is a predicate.

But who adopted this new point of view; who was it whoreally taught the universe that rests in itself motionlessly? That, ofcourse, was Parmenides. His poem is a splendid answer to thequestions raised by the Milesians. This is the logic of the thingsthat we are discussing here, not the logic according to whichwater comes first, then the indeterminate, and, finally, air. Noneof this concerns us; for us it is rather a question of what liesbehind this, the manner in which a view of reality is brought for-ward in its totality. Incidentally, this, as we have already seen, isthe same thematic with which Socrates will occupy himself in thePhaedo, where he expresses his dissatisfaction with tales peri


physeos ("about nature"). This is also just how it is with ourinterest in Anaximander's cosmogony, in which the main thingfor us is to try painstakingly to find an order that lies withinthings. The bursting originary egg has the same meaning asPlato's later remarks: the order of things presupposes a mind thatsupports reality and orders things. This involves a typical andcontinually recurring problem. We come upon it even in the con-text of Christian culture, when the question is posed of what Goddid before Creation. This question is discussed by Augustine inthe tenth book of The Confessions (and Luther proposed theanswer that God went into the forest in order to cut himself a rodwith which he could thrash those who raise such questions). If athinker is striving to understand this "new mythology," whichtakes the place of the mythology of the epic tradition, he mustapparently ask himself how it is even possible to think the originof a nature that is understood as bearing the whole in itself. Howis this question to be answered? With the help of a new mytholo-gy, a cosmogony, an originary egg, or a mystical description? Allsuch answers are no longer satisfactory for those who think in theconcepts of reason. The answer, therefore, runs as follows: thereis no originating, no motion, no change. Thus we have arrived atthe theory of what is that is formulated in Parmenides' poem. Itwas an answer to the problem that unfolded as a scientificapproach supplanted the mythical tradition as well as the gods ofMount Olympus, who, like Hermes, for instance, were alwaysinvolved in worldly affairs. The first, true, one god does not movebut rather rests in himself because he is none other than the uni-verse and is the predicate that the universe deserves.

With this, we come to Parmenides' poem, the single coherentphilosophical text that has come to us stemming from the time ofthe beginning of Western thinking. Admittedly, only a small partof a whole is preserved, a whole which we do not know in itscomplete form. Nevertheless we can conceive of a whole on thebasis of what has been handed down—that is, on the basis of thenearly complete first part and some later pieces. As we will see,the problem of this whole lies directly in the compatibility of thetwo parts. For in the first part "what is" is regarded as somethingmotionless, while a view of the processuality of nature is con-veyed in the second part.

In order to conclude what I have said up to this point, I needto add a clarification. In my approach to these themes, I


dispensed with differentiating where there are no philosophical-ly significant differences. Accordingly, I did not differentiateamong the three lonians, but I did indeed between the loniansand the Eleatics, for example. Therefore, I also did not dwell onHeraclitus, who, with regard to this new view of the universe,undoubtedly advocates a similar position to that of Parmenides.For example, there is evidence that Heraclitus criticizes poly-mathy, hence the superfluous pronouncements about manythings that he admonishes, for instance, in Homer and Hesiod,in Pythagoras, and other authors. Heraclitus refers to them col-lectively as the authors who have not grasped things correctly.This is also an answer to the question raised by the developmentof the new view of the universe. Heraclitus and Parmenidesadvocate the same position thus far. Moreover, it has not beenestablished whether they were contemporaries or if Heraclituswas possibly a little older; yet as I see it, there can be no doubtthat they fulfilled the same function within the framework of thedevelopment of early Greek thinking. And if they actually ful-filled the same function, it is not particularly astute to quarrelabout the supposed relationship between them. Perhaps theyknew nothing at all of each other. All in all, the Aristotelian andHegelian schema adopted by nineteenth-century historicismaccording to which Parmenides is regarded as a critic of Hera-clitus, as well as the counter-schema that has arisen in our owncentury, function in the end like a useless game. What is reallyimportant is to understand that both Parmenides and Heraclitusanswer the same philosophical challenge that had taken shape—albeit in different ways—in Greek poetry and tradition.

9Parmenides and the

Opinions of the Mortals

We left off at the following point: with regard to the historyof the Presocratics, Parmenides' poem is the first original

text that is available to us. And this history is the theme of ourinvestigation.

As we said at outset, the great epic tradition dating fromHomer and Hesiod, despite its mythical and narrative form, also,of course, has philosophical value. It is no accident that Eleaticphilosophy—and it is not alone in this—makes use of the Homer-ic hexameter to formulate its arguments. That a close connectioncan exist between the epic religious view and conceptual thinkinggoes without saying. We first reach a caesura between them withPlato, particularly when he puts forward as an especially charac-teristic feature of his predecessors the fact that they told fairy-tales. (We have seen this in our consideration of the Theatetus aswell as the Sophist.) From this point on, thinking sets out on thepath to the logoi, to reasoning, and to the dialectic. With Platonicand Aristotelian philosophy a new path toward the truth is taken.

We already come upon the rudiments of this kind of concep-tuality in the work of Parmenides, albeit in poetic form. Onecomplete part of his poem (about sixty lines) has been handeddown, while only a few fragments of the other part have come tous. One explanation for this, among others, is the influence exert-ed by Plato and Aristotle. In the first place, it is thanks to Plato'sinterest in the first part of the poem that it received its enduringimportance. Fortunately, this influence has not been strong

Parmenides and the Opinions of the Mortals 95

enough to cause us to lose the Proem of the didactic poem. So wehave an intact whole of this first part of the lost whole.

Before we move on to the interpretation of this piece, it isappropriate to point out that the text is written in the style ofthe epic tradition originating from Homer. This means that thisis not a book by a teacher who wants to debate another teacherpolemically. A polemic intent would not be very effective in theepic style. In the historical presentations of the Presocratics, ithas nevertheless been generally accepted that a critical discus-sion is carried out between the proponents of becoming, on theone hand, and the advocates of stability, on the other. Certain-ly, something like this is actually present there, but not, in myopinion, in the form of a polemical debate between Heraclitusand Parmenides. Ever since historicism and the philologicalworks of the nineteenth century, the sixth fragment (accordingto the Diels/Kranz numbering) has always been interpreted asevidence of this alleged polemic. Here one supposed Heraclitusto be the addressee of the Parmenidean criticism, the one whocontradictorily equates being with non-being. As have I said,however, if one takes the epic style of the whole into account,this interpretation is, in my judgment, untenable. In this con-nection, it suffices to recall the fact that the supposed cohortagainst whom Parmenides* polemic is presumed to be directedis referred to by the words "doxai broton" ("opinions of themortals'*), which are used in the poem several times. The term"brotoi" ("the mortals**) is not a word [appropriate to] a criti-cal confrontation with Heraclitus. It is used in epic poetry assynonym for "human beings** in general so as to point out thecommon lot of us all—in contrast to the immortals. It is obvi-ous, therefore, that this is not the form in which one can intro-duce a critical discussion with a great thinker. Rather, it is clearthat when "doxai brotdn" is mentioned in the sixth fragmentthe common views of the people are meant—and not the teach-ings of the wise man from Ephesus. In its time, historicism leftthe poetic value of the Parmenidean text entirely out of consid-eration. It is strange that this could happen again and again—that, even in Diels, the sequence runs, "first Heraclitus, thenParmenides.** In reality, the two were presumably contempo-raries, and when one presents them in this order then it isalready on the basis of the assumption that Parmenides haddirected his criticism against Heraclitus.


But now we need to go into the text itself, which I cite hereaccording to the Diels/Kranz edition, from which I begin with theProem. This is obviously written according to the model of theProem of Hesiod's Theogony. At the beginning of the Theogony(22-28), the muses appear to Hesiod: Hesiod is at the foot of theHelicon grazing his sheep. This is the world of his everyday life.There the muses announce to him his mission as singer of thethings that have been and the things that will be, of the great fam-ily of the gods and heroes.

We should notice that the muses say they have many truthsto teach but also much that is false. This duality of the true andthe false is extremely important, and, as will become clear to uslater, it comes to be decisive for our interpretation of the Par-menidean poem. Incidentally, the same doubleness also occurs inPlato, when he says, for example, that even the fastest athletecan be defeated in the race. There, it is an ironic formulation forthe intertwining of truth and error in intellectual action, and thiseven has its support, for instance, in Aristotle's Physics and in Deanima. Objection and refutation were used even in the discus-sions of Catholic doctrine conducted in the Middle Ages inorder, ultimately, to reach an understanding and a confirmationof the thesis with respondeo dicendum.1 This intertwining of thetrue and the false also occurs in Parmenides' poem, except that,like in Hesiod, it is also expressed here in poetic form.2 Eversince Karl Joel, perhaps even under the influence of the interestin Orphism that came to light with Nietzsche and his contempo-raries, the value of the poetic has remained practically unheededin the framework of the culture of the late nineteenth century,while the mythical-religious aspect was also underestimated. Itdoes not follow at all, however, that the form in which the newview of the motionlessness and immutability of being proclaimsitself is connected with religion. Rather, it is a typically logicalargument that being could not be non-being. Moreover, some-thing similar was already involved in the reaction (which I pre-viously pointed out) of a rhapsode like Xenophanes to the new

1. In the Sunttna Theologica, Aquinas proposes a series of possibleobjections to each article or thesis that he puts forward. He then introduceshis refutation of these objections with the phrase "Respondeo. Dicendumquod..."—literally, "I respond. Saying that...." Most translators, how-ever, elide the phrase and render it simply as "I answer that... .*

2. The syntax of this sentence is slightly modified from the German.


theories of nature. In addition to this, if we presuppose a uni-verse in balance with itself in virtue of either being carried bywater or being ordered in accordance with a regular periodicity,as the case may be, we encounter the following problem: how isit possible to describe or rather to think this universe without atthe same time raising the question of how the universe originat-ed and what was there before it? This is a problem that has occu-pied human thinking to this day.

Let us come back to the text, however. As we know, the Proemdescribes the poet's journey on a wagon. The daughters of the sunaccompany the narrator and lead him on his way. In the end, wereach a gate and the maidens remove the veils from their heads.This is a symbol for the light of truth into which they are nowentering. Here stands a gate, a mighty gate that is described indetail. The elaborate description (to which Hermann Diels hasdevoted an extensive commentary) is again connected to the refinedliterary technique that distinguishes this text. But the details of thisinterpretation are controversial. According to Simon Karsten, wholikewise published a Parmenides edition, the journey is describedfirst in the Proem, then the departure, and, finally, the arrival. Thisconstruction seems all too artificial to me. The departure does notactually occur at all. The poem tells of the arrival of the wagon atthe gate, which is opened by Dike, who is fortunately persuaded todo this by the daughters of the sun. This entrance is portrayed withthat wonderful vividness that is characteristic of this whole part ofthe Proem. One thinks, for example, of the wheels of the wagon,which rotate swiftly and squeak as they turn. These are swiftimages and quick transformations that bring to mind the sudden-ness and immediacy of inspiration. That this reflects inspiration isalso confirmed by the fact that after the salutation the goddessannounces to the poet that she wants to teach him many things. Itis extremely suggestive, however, that verbs are frequently usedhere in the iterative form, that is, in a form that corresponds nei-ther to the thought of inspiration nor that of sudden revelation, butrather seems to indicate something repetitive, which suggests amore pondering and reflective contemplation. The same thing isexpressed through repetition. If, in addition, the two sun-maidensurge the poet "again and again" (therefore not just once) to stepout of the night and into the realm of the light, then we must drawthe conclusion that the Proem contains a double metaphoricalmeaning. It is to be understood not only in the sense of inspiration


but also in the sense of die preparation for a wide road, the hodospolyphemos of the first lines, a road upon which the traveler hasexperienced much. All in all, the poet wants to give us, in extreme-ly refined form, an understanding of what experiences he hasundergone as investigator, as knower of many things, and yet in theend he needs something like an introduction by a goddess.

Another intensely debated problem concerns the identity of thegoddess. It is the same problem that also arises with regard to thename of the goddess invoked in the Proem of the Iliad. For my part,I believe I know quite well who the goddess is who speaks to thethinker. It is Mnemosyne, the goddess of mneme. Knowledge isbased on the unifying power and the carrying-ability of memory.Knowledge is a making available of experiences which accumulatemore and more and awaken the question of the meaning all of thishas for us. In a certain way we already know things through ourexperiences, and yet we would like to know what confers meaningon them all. Thus, for example, we attain true knowledge of thetheory of the universe erected by Milesian thinkers as soon as weput this theory in relation to the problem it raises, and that is thequestion of how the unity of the universe itself can be thought. Ofcourse, this problem of memory remains in the background of Par-menides' lines, and it does not come to light in conceptual form butonly as the poetic image of the goddess who reveals truth.

Let us now talk about what it is that the goddess proclaimsshe wishes to teach. She receives the visitor kindly in that sheextends her hand in reception and thus expresses greeting andtrust. This also makes us feel at home in sixth-century Greek cul-ture. "The divine instruction will encompass everything" (chredde se panta puthesthai), "not only the well-rounded truth, itsunwavering heart** (emen aletheies eukukleos atremes etor), butlikewise "the opinions of the mortals" (broton doxas).

We should notice right away that in the formulation "the heartof truth" the singular is used, while the plural stands in contrast toit: the "the opinions of the mortals." It is remarkable that the inter-pretation of Eleatic philosophy has developed in such a way thatParmenides himself has placed truth and doxa3 in opposition toone another. In reality, Parmenides does not speak at all of doxa butrather of doxai,4 which seems quite natural to me. The truth is but

3. opinion4. opinions


a singular thing, while the opinions of the people are multiple.Doxa, no doubt, was first a Platonic concept through which thedifference was marked between opinions and the one truth.

It becomes clear, therefore, that the goddess wants to teachtruth—but she also wants to teach about the opinions advocatedby mortals, opinions which do not contain the truth. The mes-sage, however, becomes more complicated in the two subsequentlines, and it is not by chance that the interpreters have focusedtheir attention on them: "One must grasp opinions in such a waythat they present themselves with their self-evident plausibilityand irrefutability." (It is unfortunate that the poetic value of thelines gets lost in translation. The Greek text has a suggestivesonority, even a cascade of tones: all' empes kai tauta matheseai,bos ta dokounta chren dokimos einai dia pantos panta peronta.)Thus the posing of the problem has to do not only with truth butalso the multiplicity of opinions. This is indirectly confirmed byAristotle (who, as we should not forget, knew the complete didac-tic poem) when he says that since Parmenides wants to assert theidentity of being he certainly denies motion and becoming, yetlater he also gives in under the pressure of experiential truth anddescribes the universe in its multiplicity and in its becoming.Many a present-day interpreter behaves just as naively: Par-menides, they say, initially denies motion and simply posits being,but then, under the compulsion of experience, he makes room forthat which is moved. To me, this seems just as absurd as theattempt undertaken by several other authors to solve the problemby adopting a different reading of the text, one in which the self-evident contradiction is made to disappear.

In truth, we are faced here with a speculative problem havingto do with the inseparability of the truth of logical thought fromexperience and its plausibility, that is, a state of affairs having todo with human nature, even lending it a certain superiority whenit knowingly makes [use of] divine help.5 The development of thehuman being is not fixed and is not dependent on the whole ofthe naturally given conditions it is subject to. The human beinghas the ability to think, to raise himself above these conditions,and to entertain a multitude of possibilities. This is the mystery ofthe openness granted to the human being, the openness for whatis possible, the idea that mortals can never simply know the one

5. wenn sie die gottliche Hilfe wissend macht


truth but will only find multiple possibilities instead. It seems tome that the basis of this thematic lies in these Parmenidean lines,where we find the inseparability of the one truth from the multi-plicity of opinions formulated in the mouth of the goddess.

Let us now examine how the theme initiated in the Proemdevelops. This development consists of a first part on truth and asecond part on opinions. Now, I would like to dwell, first of all,on the transition from the first part to the second. For in this pas-sage the correlation between the two aspects and the articulationof the whole comes to light with great clarity. Lines 50 to 52 ofthe eighth fragment state: "At this point, I am bringing my cogentargumentation and my thinking about truth to its conclusion."6

But now you must also grasp the opinions of the mortals (doxasd* apo toude broteias), who explain in words how everythingforms one cosmos, one order, that can nevertheless also deceive,and thus it need not be true but must only comply with appear-ance. It is obvious that the formulation "doxas... broteias" herecorresponds to the expression "doxai broton" used in the Proem.7This is a conscious repetition, a frequently used technique inGreek literature that indicates the conclusion of a thought. Weshould expect the beginning of a new chapter in such a case.

This new chapter thus deals with what is persuasive amongthe opinions and views concerning the universe but is not thewhole truth. The interpretation of the first lines (53ff.) is very dif-ficult. Numerous experts have worked with them and have helpedto clarify the situation by their contributions. Before I go intothese difficulties with the help of textual analysis, I would like tomention in advance how I understand these lines: human beingshave decided in favor of two forms of existing things and havefirmly designated them with two kinds of expressions. In doingthis, they have obviously committed a basic error, namely, sepa-rating the two forms rather than keeping one being.8 It is clearthat we have here a confrontation with the becoming of the world[as put forward in] in Milesian philosophy. We must repeat here:bear in mind the one saying of the Milesians that has come downto us, namely, the Anaximander fragment, which maintains thatexisting things pay penance to "each other" (allelois). You will

6. Text slightly modified from the German.7. Text slightly modified from the German.8. demeinenSein


recall that, proceeding from this term "each other," we have seenthat, according to Anaximander, the process of becoming is defi-nitely not injustice removing itself from the divine whole and thenbeing absorbed back again into this whole, this "nirvana," ofwhich Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and other nineteenth-centuryinterpreters speak. They had a text at that time in which the cru-cial "each other" was missing. Anaximander really means anorder of the universe in which no particular ever finally andabsolutely gains the upper hand, but rather is constantly balancedby another particular, as, for example, the summer comes afterthe winter in such a way that balance reestablishes itself. Wecome upon this theme again, then, in the lines considered here, aswas already announced elsewhere by the goddess when she saidshe also wanted to teach that which, in connection with nature,presents itself in such a way that observation is enough. We havethe task, therefore, to comprehend not only the themes in Par-menides that the lonians dealt with but also to realize that thesealready well-known themes are presented in a more intellectuallyconscious and better articulated form.

Let us now look at the text. Line 53 reads: morphas garkatethento duo gnomas onomazein, "The mortals have decided toname two forms of existing things." The theme is then invokedfurther in line 54: ton mian ou chreon estin, and this is the for-mulation that has caused the readers of this passage the greatestinterpretive difficulties. According to the conventional interpreta-tion, the text asserts here that one of the two forms or designationsof reality is incorrect. That, however, distorts Greek usage. For ifone says in Greek "one of the two," wanting in this way to speakof one thing in relation to another thing, one does not use theword "mia" but the word "hetera." Consequently, this "one" isnot "one of two," but rather the unity of the thing that is the trueunity behind the two different kinds. Indeed, the first word of thefollowing line reads "tantia," and this is a poetic form of "ta enan-tia? by which is meant the placing of one in opposition to anoth-er,9 and apparently it was this that underlay the thinking of thelonians, namely, that the oppositions (enantia) resist each otherand displace each other, and this puts directly into motion the sin-gle unending process, a process in which the balance continuallyrestores itself. That is the apeiron. The two separate forms of

9. das einander Entgegengesetzte


which die text speaks accordingly indicate a theory of oppositesthat balance themselves again and again, like, for instance, the bal-ance between warm and cold or between light and darkness. Thefirst step of the new "chapter" apparently consists of the insightthat all of this is compatible with the views of the lonians, whilethe second step has to do with the fact that in such an exchange ofopposites what is unthought in the nothing is still avoided. Thereis no becoming and no passing away there. When light and dark-ness replace each other—is this something separated? And doesnot the being of things remain untouched by this?

The text confirms this: it is only subsequently that humanbeings have distinguished opposites by signs (semata) that are sep-arated from one another. In the text we find charts ap* allelon, andhere once again we come upon the term "each other" (alleloi),which is already known to us from Anaximander's statement.Now we are in a position to understand the meaning of the word;evidently, it will assert that the opposites stand in correlation withone another and to this extent are not really separated from eachother. And what kind of opposites do we find here in the text?Milesian philosophy deals with the warm and the cold, the wetand the dry, and the like. By contrast, here in line 56, on the oneside stands te men phlogos aitherion pur, "the extremely light,ethereal fire that is completely identical and homogeneous withitself but not with the other, to which it is not identical but oppo-site," to d' hetero me tauton. For on the other side stands night,die darkness, the dense and heavy gloom. Observe how superiorthis is to the Milesian view. Here, the talk is of a single oppositethat is not "being" at all but rather appearance, be it light or dark-ness. At the same time, the excellence of the light, which is por-trayed with positive qualities and thereby distinguishes itself fromthe night, stands out. Night is characterized by negative qualities.But what does "positive" mean here vis-a-vis "negative"? In myopinion, the answer is clear: light and darkness are "positive" and"negative" not as realities but rather in relation to knowledge.Light is something positive for the appearance of being, whilenight has a negative effect on this appearance. Here, we may getthe impression that these opposites go without saying, yet I wouldhope that by now the principle inspiring them is clear, namely, thata thing is understood correctly when we have grasped its implica-tions. The principle of a viable hermeneutics is always to interpreta text in such a way that what is implicitly in it is made explicit;


if, for example, I set about interpreting a section from Hegel'sLogic with my students or even some colleagues, what emerges asthe result of our long debate is an elaboration of the Hegelian textThe same also happens in our Parmenides interpretation, provid-ed we are on the right path with our work.

The result that we have reached through the interpretation ofthese lines amounts to the following: first, we find in the above-mentioned lines a view of the universe according to which it con-sists of reciprocally interrelated and inseparable oppositions. Sec-ond, this view is conceptually superior to that of the loniansbecause it avoids the thought of the nothing. Third, the image oflight and darkness that recapitulates this view points to theappearance of being and its knowability. This last point can bemade clearer when we refer to those passages of the didacticpoem (like, for example, fragment 6, line 1, as well as fragment3) in which being is equated with noein. We usually render theword *noein" in translation as "thinking"; however we shouldnot forget that the primary meaning of the word is not to becomeabsorbed in oneself, not reflection, but, on the contrary, pureopenness for everything. In regard to MOMS, it is not, first of all, aquestion of one asking oneself what is seen to be there in eachcase but of observing that there is something there. The etymolo-gy of the word probably leads us back to the sensation of theanimal, which notices the presence of something by its scent andwithout any more exact perception. This is how we must under-stand the relationship between "thinking" and being in Par-menides and also why, in the eighth fragment, which we haveexamined here, noein is mentioned with particular emphasisalongside the other features of being. It is as though the textwanted to say that it is the being of being itself that comes intopresence in such a way that this being is as immediately there inits existence as the day is.

In view of the Parmenidean image of the mild (friendly andbenevolent) ethereal fire that is homogeneous in itself, I would liketo raise another question. We have interpreted this fire as the light inwhich the appearance of being becomes clean But we must alsoplace it in relation to ancient cosmology. The ancient view accord-ing to which the heavenly bodies are fires requires that fire bereduced to a stable being10 that has no destructive or self-consuming

10. ein stabiles Sein


reality—and, indeed, Anaximander is attributed with the idea thatthere are holes in the firmament through which the fire of theheavenly bodies sparkles and twinkles. It therefore emerges fromthe doxographical descriptions that, in Anaximander, fire, as anelement, must above all exclude that which is destructive. Now,the opposite of the destructive is epion, and the text actually usesthis expression (in fragment 8, line 57), where the word signifiesmildness, gentleness, friendliness. How much of a problem firewas, one can also see in the Timaeus (31b-33). In the constructionof that enormous living organism that forms the universe, a diffi-cult relationship exists between fire and the remaining elements.One also comes across the same thing in Stoic philosophy, accord-ing to which there is a fire that does not destroy but rather illumi-nates and animates. Thus, as we saw, with the background ofAnaximander's cosmological ideas, fire can be assumed as a non-destructive but instead stable and homogeneous element that dis-penses light and makes [things] visible, albeit only with help ofholes. Still further examples could be cited to validate the fact thatsome motifs of the lonians' meteorological and astronomical the-ories are mirrored in Parmenides. Yet what matters to us here isunderstanding what happens in such mirroring. We have to under-stand this fire as becoming light and [taking on] the homogeneityand self-identity of light. The identity of being is made plain withthis. Here, there is an evident rapprochement with the opinions ofthe mortals, opinions which are satisfied by appearances.

Through the analysis of the last lines of the eighth fragment,we have therefore reached the conclusion that these lines charac-terize the transition from a first part dedicated to explicating thetruth (hence the first fifty lines of this eighth fragment), to a sec-ond part, which is occupied with the presentation of opinionsthat mortals hold regarding the universe. This second part has notbeen handed down to us as well-preserved as the first, yet it willalso have certainly contained a detailed and well-structureddepiction that is, to be sure, an opinion of mortals but one inwhich knowledge is presented. This is not merely a vague suppo-sition, for there is a uninterrupted tradition here. A confirmationfor this can be found, for instance, in the sixteenth fragment,which consists of the only four undoubtedly authentic lines thatare quoted by Aristotle (Metaphysics T5, 1009b 21). The textreads: hos gar hekastot echei krasin meleon polukampton—"asthe relationship of the limbs of the organism develops itself*'—ids


noos anthropoisi paristatai—"so nous appears in human beings."(Put another way: thinking as consciousness of something, asintellectual perception, is related to the constitution of the organ-ism; the one exists as soon as the other is present—and, in regardto this, one must keep in mind the medicine and the biology ofthose centuries.) To gar auto estin hoper phroneei meleon physisanthropoisin kai pasin kai panti—"it is always the same thingthat thinks, (namely) the composition of the organism in each andevery person"; to gar pleon esti noema—"that which is perceivedis always what predominates," like the light that fills everything.

This text, toward an interpretation of which true rivers of inkhave been spilled, must stand in relationship to the medicine andthe sciences of that time, a time in which we already find the ideathat perception depends on the mixture of the elements in thehuman organism. This idea is not really new, it seems to me. But ifwe take into account the already discussed intention of this part ofthe didactic poem—the intention of commonly accepted ideas—then the real task of interpretation comes into view. Here, that is,our task is to comprehend in what sense, on which points, and inwhat respect this conception is superior to that of the lonians.

We want first to emphasize here that in epic poetry there wasalready a mythological explanation according to which theappearance of thinking in the human being is traced back to adivine power. In the lonians, as in Parmenides, who in turn refersback to the lonians, the theme is brought to light in a new way:perception and thinking do not originate through the influence ofa divine power but rather by the mixing of the humours of theorganism. This is, as we have seen, an idea that must be broughtinto connection with the balance of the organism that medicinehad worked out at that time. In this approach, the sensation ofwarmth or coldness, for instance, is based on changes in theinherent balance of die organism—like, for example, in the caseof fever, where it is clear that there is no warmth in itself or cold-ness in itself as two separate essences. In regard to this theme, letus recall the previously examined Parmenides quotation where itsays that people posit separate and opposing forms of reality anddesignate these with different names (here one could cite "thewarm" and "the cold" as examples), while that which truly is11 istheir unity. For this reason, their separation into independent

11. das wabrhaft Seiende


powers is misguided; in truth, it is precisely noein that constitutestheir unity. Grasped in this sense, the relationship between knowl-edge and light is also explained: in conscious thinking, whenthings become visible and identifiable it is like a light going on.The absence of such acuity presents itself like a darkness in whichnothing at all exists. Thus it gradually becomes clear why thisview of noein signifies a step forward in the direction of truth.The unity and the self-sameness of noein lead to the self-sameness,the homogeneity, in the end, to the identity of being. To get a gripon all of this, we should not, of course, come to a stop with theopposition between the relativity of sense perceptions and theabsoluteness of "thinking." Sensory perception is in a certainsense already conscious perception. Therefore it is co-intended innoein. We are constantly inclined toward seeing things in that weknow and recognize their identity. Thanks to modern psycholog-ical research, how much the tendency to the identical is inherentin all things of the senses12 is no longer big news. Here we seesomething that we have come across in Parmenides' didacticpoem: the stability of being is that which announces itself in therelativity of perception.

12. alien Dingen der Sinnlichkeit

10Parmenides and Being

Up to this point we have gone into the Proem of the Par-menidean didactic poem and also into the first part of the

poem, which is dedicated to truth and is quite tersely composed,though Simplicius did hand it down to us intact. We then turnedto the second part, which deals with opinions and must have beenlonger. But only the beginning lines and some fragments havecome down to us. I would like to place our encounter with thissecond part of the didactic poem ahead of our treatment of thefirst part, which we have not yet analyzed completely. This fore-stalling is well-considered. It was important for me to make clearthat the task announced in the Proem is not just restricted to thetruth but that it also encompassed the opinions of mortals andwas actually present throughout the course of the didactic poem.This is why I made a leap that led immediately from the Proem tothe last lines of the eighth fragment, where the transition from thepresentation of the truth to the comments on the opinions of themortals is carried out. I would like here to underscore once againthe importance of this double thematic in the mouth of the god-dess. In truth, it is a characteristic feature of the human being,indeed, even the sign of its superiority. For it is humanity's markof distinction to raise problems and to open up the dimension ofdiverse possibilities. This is why the capacity for truth and false-hood both in our will to know and in our being-with-one-anotheris a peculiarity of the human being. Thus we recall seeing thateven in Hesiod, that is, at the beginning of the Theogony, themuses make it known that they could teach the true but also thefalse. Even these seed donors play on our weaknesses. All in all,


since human beings are by necessity exposed to a multitude ofinfluences and distractions, it turns out that untruth inheres in theconcept of knowledge itself, that it is an inseparable, even consti-tutive, element of knowledge.

Starting with these reflections, I have then tried to show thatIonic conceptions of the universe stand behind Parmenides'didactic poem, conceptions that replace the cosmogonies of themyths, especially the representation mentioned by Anaximanderin the only surviving aphorism of a universe formed in an order-ly way through opposites that constantly and regularly balanceeach other. In contrast to these Milesian doctrines, Parmenidesintroduces an important innovation: in place of the many differ-ent oppositions between wet and dry, warm and cold, and so on,Parmenides inserts a single oppositional pair, namely the contrastbetween light and darkness. On the basis of this innovation, Par-menides surpasses the Ionic tradition. This light is the light ofknowledge. This is why it is positively emphasized in the didacticpoem that the fire is not a destructive fire but a mild one, thus nota blazing flame but only one that sheds light. The distinctionbetween these two types of fire still remains unexpressed in Par-menides and will only be made entirely explicit with the Stoics.

Furthermore, in order to support the thesis of Parmenides'superiority, I have analyzed the fragment quoted by Aristotle,fragment 16, hi which it is said that noein, thinking, rests on therelationship between the different components of the organism.Here I have initially rendered the word "noein" in the tradition-al way by the term "thinking." Yet in doing so we should not for-get that this word would be completely incomprehensible here ifwe did not grasp it in its original meaning. I repeat: "noein"means the sensing1 of something that is there, rather like thescent2 of game, to which we are perhaps also led by the etymolo-gy of the word. The immediacy implied in the meaning of thisword is fundamental to the entire argument of the didactic poem.If we do not comprehend this, we cannot even begin to under-stand the claim that Parmenides makes about the inseparability ofbeing and noein: there is something only to the extent that evi-dentness—that is, perception in its broadest sense—is present innoein', only to this extent is "being" there. If we wished to use a

1. dasSpiiren2. Or spoor: der Witterung.

Parmenides and Being 109

scholastic expression, we could say that we were dealing herewith the problem of haecceitas.3 We do come across this problemtoday in Heidegger's "being-question," but it already becomesvisible much earlier in Parmenides' noein and likewise in Aristo-tle, who connects noein with touching (thinganein) as it occurs inthe immediacy of perceiving, when no distance at all is indicatedbetween the perception and what is perceived. Indeed, even wesay "it smells" or "it smells of something" long before we speakof it in reflective manner—we say that a certain nose notices thisor that smell. As soon as words and concepts come into the play,such immediacy is gone.

In conclusion, I would like to come back once again to thedeclaration expressed in the Proem about the path of truth andthe path of opinions in order to substantiate an earlier admoni-tion that is worth repeating: in Parmenides, we find only the plur-al, "doxai" The word is hardly ever used in the singular. Evenwhen related expressions are used, they always occur in the plur-al (like, for example, "ta dokounta").4 This is why it is misguid-ed to claim that die second part of Parmenides' didactic poem isall about doxa. This is Platonism not Eleaticism. The word"doxa" only becomes a concept in Platonic philosophy. Aisthesis,doxa, and logos, as we know, are the three concepts with whichPlato in the Theatetus attempts to define knowledge.

Let us now come back to the analysis of the first part of thepoem, the part, that is, that deals with the presentation of truth,and let us begin with fragments 2 and 3, the sequence of which ismuch debated. I think they can be read consecutively, and bothcan also be read as elaborations of what has been designated asthe first fragment, that is, the Proem. The second fragment beginswith the claim that two paths of investigation are conceivable.The one path is that along which it is said that the "is" exists but"non-being" does not (estin te kai hos ouk esti me einai), and thisis the path of truth that is accompanied by the power of persua-sion. The other path is that along which it is said that the "is-not"(ouk estin) is and non-being is asserted. But this is a completelyhopeless path.

We undoubtedly have before us here an extremely refined andconceptually polished text that is not easily interpreted. The task

3. "thisness"4. "things that appear" or "things that seem"


of the interpreters is hindered by the fact that not two but threepaths are indicated in the fragment, which then raises the ques-tion of what this third path is. The proponents of the thesis thatParmenides was a critic of Heraclitus latch onto this problem.They claim that the third path is precisely the thinking of Hera-clitus. But a third path is mentioned in the sixth fragment, andmortals travel along this path. Nevertheless, as we have alreadyseen, the expression employed here, "brotoi" cannot be read asthough an individual were intended by it—and thus not thephilosopher from Ephesus either.

For now, we would like to restrict ourselves to the two pathsmentioned in the second fragment and try to understand why theone path leads to truth while the other leads to no goal and isindeed an impossibility. With this, we must first realize that "it is"(estin) here is tantamount to "there is"5 and does not functionlike the copula that binds the subject and the predicate togetheras it does in Aristotle and in grammar. Here it is the immediacyof being that we perceive in "noein," wherein "legein"6 has notbeen separated from sensory perception, but rather, as I have triedto show, where immediacy, the inseparability of the perceived andthe perceiving, is meant exclusively. Some might see in this theconcept of identity characteristic of German idealism, but thatwould be an anachronism, as this could only arise in the periodof historicism. In the realm of philosophy, historicism has oftenproduced the paradoxical result of misjudging the differencebetween immediacy and reconstructed immediacy.

The last line of the second fragment says that it is not possi-ble to formulate that which is not7 (me eon), for this can neitherbe investigated nor communicated.

It is possible that the third fragment forms the continuation ofthis text: to gar auto noein estin te kai einai.6 In the meantime,Agostino Marsoner has convinced me that fragment 3 is not a Par-menides quotation at all but a formulation stemming from Platohimself, which I believe I have correctly interpreted and which

5. esgibt6. Literally, "to gather": infinitive of the verb "/ego," which is the root

of the noun "/ogos."7. das Nicbtseiende8. "For the same thing exists [ot, is there] for thinking and for being"

(Gadamer will argue against this reading; see below); alternatively, "Forthinking and being are the same."


Clement of Alexandria has ascribed to Parmenides. In order tointerpret this fragment, we must confirm that estin does not servehere as a copula but instead means existence9 and, in fact, not justin the sense that something is there but also in the characteristicclassical Greek sense that it is possible, that it has the power tobe. Here, of course, "that it is possible" includes that it is. Sec-ondly, we must be clear about what is meant by "the same" (toauto). Since this expression stands at the beginning of the text, itis generally understood as the main point and therefore as thesubject On the contrary, in Parmenides "the same" is always apredicate, hence that which k stated of something. Admittedly, itcan also stand as the main point of a sentence, but not in the func-tion of the subject, about which something is stated, but in thefunction of the predicate that is stated of something. This some-thing in the sentence analyzed here is the relationship between*'estin noeinn and "estin einai," between "[is] perceiving/think-ing" and "[is] being." These two are the same, or, better yet: thetwo are bound together by an indissoluble unity. (Furthermore, itshould be added that the article "to" does not refer to "einai" butto "auto." In the sixth century, an article was not yet placed infront of a verb. In Parmenides' didactic poem, where the necessi-ty arises of expressing what we render with the infinitive of a verbtogether with a preceding article, a different construction is used.)This interpretation, the one I am proposing for the third frag-ment, was, as I recall, the object of a dispute with Heidegger. Hedisagreed altogether with my view of the evident meaning of thepoem. I can well understand why Heidegger wanted to hold ontothe idea that Parmenides' main theme was identity (to auto). InHeidegger's eyes, this would have meant that Parmenides himselfwould have gone beyond every metaphysical way of seeing andwould thereby have anticipated a thesis that is later interpretedmetaphysically in Western philosophy and has only come into itsown in Heidegger's philosophy. Nevertheless, in his last essaysHeidegger himself realized that this was an error and that his the-sis that Parmenides had to some extent anticipated his own phi-losophy could not be maintained.

Let us now proceed to the fourth fragment, whose placementafter the third fragment is admittedly highly dubious. The fourthfragment throws a very bright light on an approach, never before

9. Existenz


attempted, of a thinker who was occupied with the themes ofbecoming and being for the relationship between identity and dif-ference. It should be mentioned here that these concepts were firstbrought together in the Sophist with the words "stasis" and "gen-esis," unmoving and originating.

Let us now interpret the fragment leusse d* homos apeontanodi pareonta bebaios: along with nous (the capacity for imme-diate perception) we must also consider that which is absent(hence that which is also accessible to nous), and we should pro-ceed in this "with firmness" (bebaios), without wavering.Accordingly, we should not regard as self-evident the fact thatwhat is present is and what is absent is not, but rather we shouldestablish without uncertainty in each case that what is absent is,in a certain sense, also present. I stress "bebaios" emphaticallybecause in the didactic poem we are frequently reminded that thedanger is always present of straying from the path leading totruth and letting ourselves be seduced by the illusion that ifsomething just appears then it did not previously exist. In frag-ments 7 and 8 a quite exact and precise argument is thenexpounded to justify the necessity of avoiding this diversion. Thetine of the fourth fragment examined here is essentially a priordeclaration of what is then established in the first part of thedidactic poem.

The fragment then continues with the same topic: "what iscannot be separate from its connection with what is" (ou garapotmexei to eon tou eontos echesthai), and "according to theorder of things it is neither possible that what is scatters itselfnor that it conglomerates" (oute skidnamenon pantei pantoskata kosmon oute sunistamenon). It clearly emerges, even fromthe formulations used here, that he is speaking of Ionic philoso-phy. That what is, is not separable from what is does not mean,by the way, that there are two of what is. This conclusion isalready precluded by Parmenides' wording. At this point, wecome across "to eon"10 for the first time, the emphatic singularthat occurs again and again in Parmenides' poem and anticipatesthe One (to hen) of Zeno and Plato. It does not lead to exactlythe same thing, however. Parmenides' "to eon" is only a firstapproximation of the abstract concept of the One. Thus the Onealso occurs in Parmenides, yet in the first place and strictly

10. Singular imperfect for eimi, "to be."


speaking, for him the one being11 is intended as "being."12

Before him, one said "ta onta" and thus it is said in Homer thatTiresias knows the things that are (ta onto) and the things thatwill be (ta proionta). In regard to this topic, we also want torecall the Socrates of the Phaedo, who says he has concernedhimself much peri physeos historia. Here he uses a formulationin which the last word, "historia," signifies the course of experi-ences in all of their diversity. To put it another way, previouslythe diversity of what is was all about the balance of the universe."To eon" however, implies that it has nothing to do with thediversity of experiences, the listing of them, but rather that with-out the unity of being all of this no longer exists. This certainlymeans that to eon cannot be separate from tou eontas; what ispossesses cohesion (continuity) and unity. Obviously the uni-verse [is meant] as universe in its unity, and this universe in itsunity means at the same time the concept of being. To put itmore precisely, it is not yet the concept but it is a full abstractionof the diversity of things. This singular is like an indicator of thebeginning of conceptual-speculative reflection.

The fifth fragment states that it makes no difference fromwhich point one proceeds, since one always comes back to thesame place anyway. This obviously confirms the homogeneity of,the uniformity of, existing "being,"13 a theme that, as we saw, istaken up anew later on.

The sixth fragment is the answer to the problem of truth andto the declaration of the correct path of truth. This fragmentbegins with following words: chre to legein te noein t* eon emme-nai; esti gar einai; meden d* ouk estin. In order to understand themeaning of this part of the text, we first want to recall that the"esti" of the second clause displays the ambiguity that we clari-fied previously. The term means "it is," but for precisely this rea-son it also means "is possible that it is." It not only expresses exis-tence,14 but exactly at the same time it also expresses the possibil-ity of existence. Accordingly, the meaning of the second clauseruns as follows: "being is, and it is possible; the nothing, by con-trast, is not, and it also is not possible." This helps us to under-stand that the "eon" of the first clause also has this ambiguity and

11. das eine Seiende12. dasSein13. des seienden "Seins"14. Dasein


means the one that is and is possible; that is, it possesses thecapacity to be. Finally, it remains for us to clarify that "to" mustrefer to "eon" because this latter term never occurs in the didac-tic poem without an article. A preliminary interpretation of thefirst clause is as follows: "It is necessary that both the saying aswell as the thoughtful perceiving of what is cannot, as existence,15

be disengaged from the consequence of being expressed and per-ceived; the presentness16 of being is precisely its perception."Understood in this way, the clause seems like a convincing repe-tition of what has already been said. We will come back later tothe significance of this repetition.

For the moment we will follow the progress of the fragment,which, following the admonition to think over the truth pro-claimed here and not forget it, states expressly that we must notforget to avoid the path of the nothing, but we must also not for-get the other path, the path upon which mortals stumble abouthesitantly, erringly, and in constant uncertainty. Their inability toorient themselves, an inability which they carry in their hearts,leads them to a foolish perceiving (plakton noon). This is thepoint from which the problematic third way, which will be addedto the two mentioned previously, originates. I repeat, this is aproblem that historicism has solved in its way by equating thissupposed third path with the thinking of Heraclitus because thedescription of the path is, in a certain way, reminiscent of certainof this philosopher's aphorisms. Parmenides had obviously notforeseen the tremendous acumen of the philosophers of the nine-teenth century, who were even capable of finding in the text whatwas not in it. In truth, the so-called third path is nothing otherthan the description of the second, that is, the path of nothing-ness; and the mortal people who stride ahead on this path are, aswe have already said, called by the epic term "brotoi," which can-not really serve to describe an individual, and certainly not Her-aclitus. It is rather about people in general. They blunder around,are blind, dense (akrita phula), that is, people without the abilityto judge. They conceive of being (pelein) and non-being now assomething identical and now as something non-identical. Theyare seen this way: "Their path is always wrong because it is con-tradictory" (panton de palintropos esti keleuthos). This means

15. alsdasDasein16. Gegenwdrtigkeit


that all hypotheses of mortals regarding the "is** and the "is not"always end in a contradiction; these hypotheses amount to thefact that we intend "is" and "is not" in the same breath. Only asuperficial interpretation could maintain that this description ofthe contradiction—somewhat like with the claim that tauton andthateron are identical—points to the dialectic of Heraclitus.Occasionally even a little arrogance is involved in the certaintywith which this interpretation is pursued. We are pushed towardit by the superb historical research of the nineteenth century. Yet,as we have seen, historicism, despite all its astuteness, could beblind in some respects. I would not by any means want to beunderstood as though I did not appreciate the method of the his-torians. It is just that philosophy is something different.

With the insight that this sixth fragment describes the conse-quences of the lack of orientation common to all human beings,we have, in my opinion, taken a decisive step forward. Humanbeings have the characteristic of getting into contradictions with-out noticing it because they conceive of what is absent as a non-being, and the delusion of becoming occurs because of it. Thatsomething could be produced from nothing simply is not accept-able for human reason. Ex nihilo nihil fit—this is the highest prin-ciple of our orientation in the world of experience. The DivineCreation of the world was brought into play here first throughChristianity, or actually through the Old Testament, albeit withoutunderstanding the mystery of such a Creation. This happens earli-est with Augustine when he speaks of the Word that announces:**Let there be light!" The Greeks were able to understand [theequivalent of] the Word of God with which the Old Testamentintroduces the Creation in the sense of a creative capacity.

Thus die sixth fragment portrays the chaos of opinionsbetween which human beings of blurred judgment vacillate backand forth whenever they must find their way about in the world:"It is, it is not"; "There is something, and precisely the same thingis not there"; "It is there, it is not there"; and "As soon as itcomes into appearance it comes from out of nothing." Such lackof direction is certainly not the description of a speculative think-ing—like that of a thinker such as Heraclitus—but rather depictsthe unconscious contradictions upon which the errors and aber-rations of human beings are based.

Here, I would like to offer a concluding comment regardingthe sixth fragment. In order to clarify the structure of the text and


to bolster the logic of its argument, Parmenides, like Plato, mustmake use of a literary device. The method of repetition, of whichthe beginning of our fragment furnished an obvious example,belongs to devices of this type. This method is used for a publicthat does not read but follows the recitation of a text spoken bythe author. This is characteristic of the preliterate cultural epochwith which we are dealing here. For this reason, the repetitionshould not be regarded as an accident. It belongs to what wemight well call a mnemonic technique, and indeed it belongs justas much to the rhapsode as to the listener. From this it emergesthat Parmenides' text is not thoroughly archaic even from a liter-ary standpoint but rather presents itself as an exquisitely articu-lated composition—even through "repetition.**

Now we want to proceed to fragments 7 and 8, which togeth-er form one coherent text. It says here that "it cannot be forciblymaintained that what is not17 exists** (ou gar mepote touto damei;einai me eonta), and through no force, as it further says, can webe compelled to follow this path, which would be tantamount to"letting wander eyes that do not see** (noman askopon omma).This latter formulation is of high literary worth. The eye wanderseagerly (implicit in the word "noman" is the incentive for theattainment of a goal), and moreover it wanders over the sur-veyed18 totality of things, yet it is without sight, sightless (asko-pon)9 because it cannot grasp any existing thing. This is a verybeautiful image that expands further and extends from the eyes tothe din-filled ear (echeessan akouen) and to the tongue (kai glos-san ). (We should observe here that the tongue—just like thesightless eye and the ear that hears nothing because of the din—is meant here in the sense of the sense of taste.) The advice is thusto lend no credence to appearance; rather, we must judge "withthe understanding** (logoi). The term "logoi," it seems to me, isused here without conceptual implications. I have not pursued thematter further, yet I suspect that "krinai logoi," just like manyother formulations from the didactic poem, is rhapsodic in origin,and it is understandable that a philosopher of this time would beglad to come upon expressions that could be useful for instruc-tion in his own teachings. For this reason there are often agree-ments with Homer.

17. das Nicbtseiende18. angepeilten


The argument is continued in the eighth fragment: monos d'eti mythos hodoio leipetai hos estin. (We should observe thathere "mythos" stands closer to "logos" than to fairy-tale;"mythos" means everything that I can relate and plainly con-notes a wide-ranging story.) A single account of a path remains,and on this path there are many signs—here, Heidegger wouldspeak of "Wegmarken"19—to indicate the direction of the goaland to prevent any straying from the path. In Heidegger, as well,the path-signs20 undoubtedly signify the continuous progressionof a path in a certain direction, toward a goal. In Parmenides,this expression has the same meaning, and in this context weshould think of the word "bebaios" of the emphatic insistencewith which it is to be stressed that what is absent is at the sametime present and that there is no non-existing being.21 Theemphatic repetition that what is, is and what does not exist22 isnot indicates the direction toward which what is thought is ori-ented by the goddess's instruction.

There are therefore many signs from which it follows that thenothing can never be. The first says: hos aganeton eon kaianolethron estin, which is usually understood in the sense thatwhat is has not been generated and cannot pass away. But this isnot how it stands in the text because there it is not called "to eon"but "eon" without the article. This substantiates my point andmeans that because it is, it is not generated and cannot pass away.

The text then continues: "It is a whole, immovable and with-out goal" (esti gar oulomeles te kai atremes ed' ateleston). Thisline is interesting because of the variants of "oulomeles." In placeof this word we find—as we do, by the way, in Simplicius—theword "mounogenes."23 Now, I think that this term, if it followsimmediately upon "ageneton,"24 is not to be expected straight-away, and "mounogenes" is therefore highly questionable aboveall because it is a term characteristic of Christian confessions.Thus it more likely comes from the quill of a copyist than the textof Parmenides. The word "oulomeles" means something like "ofsound limbs," a formulation that recalls the living organism,

19. pathmarks20. Wegzeichen21. Nichtseiende22. das Nichtseiende23. one of a kind, unique24. unborn, uncreated


hence that image that is often used as a model to describe the uni-verse (and certainly not in its multiplicity but rather as the One),the universe which leads its life and is lacking nothing in order forit to be itself a single great organism. The word "oulomeles" asused by Parmenides evidently means that the universe is one thingand by itself contains everything in itself.

Thus the text continues: "It is impossible, furthermore, that itever has been and that it ever will be" (oude pot* en oud* estai),"for it is now as the whole universe" (epei nun estin homou pan).We should note here the singular "pan." Heribert Boeder haspointed out that "being"25 in Presocratic philosophy was first indi-cated in certain cases by the plural, as "ta panta," or with theexpression "ta onta," which also occurs in Homer. Thus the use ofthe singular here is an emphatic stress: "It is all one"; and so thetext continues: "one and unbroken" (hen suneches). This is theonly passage in this text in which oneness26 is expressly named—which then in Zeno leads to the dialectic of the one and the manyand produces the discourse of the Eleatic doctrine of unity.

At this point, the argument begins concerning the previouslymentioned characteristics of that which is, above all concerningthe fact that it was not generated: tina gar gennan dizeseai autou;pet pothen auxethen—"How would it be possible to determine itsorigin; how would it be able to grow?" In my opinion, GuidoCalogero has seen things correctly—even against Karl Reinhardt,who invoked inappropriate evidence for support here—when inhis book on Eleaticism Calogero explains in a comment in thechapter on Melissus that Parmenides' argument at this pointexcludes two things, namely, generation and growth. Generationobviously includes non-being27: it implies that that which is nowgenerated was not previously there. But already excluded by thisis the fact that what is not can be intended or brought to expres-sion. For its part, growth leads in turn to the contradiction ofgenesis and of becoming because it likewise implies that thatwhich it now is was not previously there in this way. To summa-rize, both becoming and growing obviously include the me eon.2*In this way, the further course of the argument becomes clear.

25. Sein26. Einssein27. Nichtsein28. not being


One can neither say nor think (noein) a becoming from out ofnothing. This will be explained further.

We find the conclusion that is to be drawn from this argu-ment in lines 15 and 16: he de krisis peri teuton en toid' estin;estin he ouk estin—"the decision about these things goes: eitherit is, or it is not.** Everything is decided with this. The path ofwhat is not is impassable. At this point, we notice a repetitionthat marks the end of one train of thought and the beginning ofa new one in accordance with the previously formulated princi-ple, a kind of "period" or "new paragraph.**

The new train of thought amounts to the claim that what isis not divisible, it is in itself dense (continuous), homogeneous,and immovable. Of course, the claim that there is no motion rais-es the biggest problems. This, we could say, is the toughest chal-lenge. Plato also discusses motion—he does so, in fact, in the The-atetus—yet he distinguishes two forms of motion, namely, achange of place and alteration, a qualitative change. Parmenides,on the other hand, makes no such differentiation and uses a poet-ic image in respect to these two forms as if they were the same:necessity has clapped being in irons, and it could not thereforeremove itself by itself. This thought influenced the physicist, Aris-totle, and inclined him to pay little heed the doctrine of Par-menides, just as it also affected the mathematician, Plato, who, onthe other hand, found in the Eleatics the conceptual model for theimmutability of the ideas. Being has no external purpose: esti garouk epideuest it lacks nothing at all, and if something were lack-ing—me eon d* an pantos edeito—then everything would be miss-ing (line 33).

A fresh and well-judged repetition occurs in this passage. Asa representative of a preliterate culture, Parmenides structures hisdiscourse with this repetition and, in that he brings prominenceto such an especially important thought, he lends it strength. Thisthought reads:

tauton d* esti noein te kai houneken esti noema;ou gar aneu tou eontost en hoi pephatismenon estin,heureseis to noein.The first part of this quotation (tauton . . . noema) reminds

us a little of the third fragment, which seemed suspicious to us.Of course, utautonn is a predicate here as well and refers to "estinoeinn and "esti noema." (With regard to this, we must offer the


explanatory remark that "noema" does not, of course, have thesame meaning that it will have later in Aristotle. Here, is it syn-onymous with "noesis." It is that which is felt, that which istouched, and cannot be separated at all from feeling, from touch-ing. The important thing, as we have already mentioned, liesexactly in this lack of a differentiation.) Being that appearsalready involves being: esti noema, "noema is." Moreover, in thesecond part of the quotation (ou gar . . . to noein) it is thenclaimed that "without the being29 in which it is expressed nothinking is to be found.** This is not quite comprehensible formodern philosophy. Therefore we understand it like this: "beingcould not be in what is expressed, but rather it must be in beingitself.** At most, being could be inherent in thinking. This wouldseem to be what Parmenides wants to say. Hermann Frankel wasalso of this opinion—that being does not inhere in what isexpressed but in what is thought. But all this is the result of amodernistic distortion that goes so far as to read a raft of thingsinto Parmenides that are not present there at all: subjectivity, self-consciousness, Hegel and speculative idealism, epistemology andits distinction between subject and object. So we imagine thatParmenides had already recognized the superiority of the self-reflexivity of thinking. I am sorry, but none of this is in the text.There is, however, something in the text about being that express-es itself, and that is: "There, where being comes to appearance,the perception of being occurs.**

Another important thought follows from the thesis accordingto which there is no perception without the self-expression ofbeing: since there is no non-being, there can be nothing outside ofbeing, for now it is the whole that is without motion, and soforth. Moira has fettered it and has so fixed it in place that it isone (again we find here the expression "OM/OW,** "whole**) andwithout motion. Human beings are mistaken when they maintainthat there are becoming, originating and passing away, being andnon-being, motion, and finally even that bright color changes: diate chroa phanon ameibein. This is a very beautiful image, animage that I would like to linger with here at the end of my analy-sis of the Parmenidean didactic poem. Here, we are dealing withan allusion to the fact that human beings are practically emptiedby their experiences between being and non-being. This is an

29. dasSeiende


allusion to the transitoriness and futility of all things. Color fadesand disappears. Even in English we can say that the color fadesand is no longer as vigorous and fresh as it was before. This fad-ing of the color cannot actually be observed; we can only deter-mine at a certain point in time that color has become weakerwithout our being able see when and how the color began tolessen, lime fades away, and colors also fade .... That is themood behind this image, and the poet is undoubtedly driving atthis. He wants to call into consciousness the anxiety that mortalsfeel about the fact that everything generated falls prey to tran-sience, that everything born must die. But the goddess knows thisbetter than mortals do.

As I now come to the conclusion of this lecture series, I would liketo recall our starting point again and add some considerations ofa general nature.

We first brought the Presocratics closer to us via the texts ofPlato and Aristotle. This happened in the conviction that thisapproach was necessary in order to gradually bring language intothe discussion. This is a language that, for the most part, is notyet conceptual but is already moving in this direction. Thus wefound out that this language wants to convey an image of whatwe call the universe. We can now use the expression "universe"in the correct way in reference to the Presocratics. That is to say,we know that, on the one hand, this expression represents ananticipation, for Milesian philosophy does not yet succeed in real-ly unifying the totality of things conceptually—and [seeing themas] the One. On the other hand, their philosophy does correspondto the direction that thinking takes later on. They were on a questfor the unity of the world, but the concept was not yet there. Atthe moment, I myself am not entirely sure at what point the word"universe** appears; I am certainly not sure about the equivalentof the Greek "cosmos." Perhaps it is in Lucretius. In any case, weare dealing with a Latin expression full of significance, for it helpsexplain the quest for the one world.

Let us now turn to a few thoughts about the [historical] posi-tion of these interpretations of the Presocratics. I do not want torepeat here what I have already written in my essay published inQuestions di storiografia filosofica; I will therefore limit myself topointing out that interest in the Presocratics begins first withRomanticism. Of course, there were comprehensive handbooks


even earlier—in die eighteenth century—which, like the work ofJohann Jakob Brucker, for example, offered an abundance ofmaterial about the writings of antiquity as they had been collect-ed through the efforts of Fabricius or Stephanus. This materialwas nothing more than a repetition of the ancient doxographywithout any historiographical ambition; just like in the ancientdoxography, it was a simple catalogue of the various opinions. Wehave now seen in the course of our investigation to what heightsof nonsense blind doxography can attain. Here, I would like tocite another example: if in line 42 of the eighth fragment Par-menides says that the universe is tetelesmenon, then that meansthat the universe is complete in itself, that it is a whole and leavesnothing outside itself. This view is then rendered by Melissus withthe expression "apeiron." Theophrastus, on the other hand, islater quite surprised to "discover" that Parmenides said that hisuniverse is tetelesmenon, and yet this means "finite," while Melis-sus advocated an infinite universe, the apeiron. All of this is com-plete nonsense. As we have already seen with reference to Anaxi-mander, "apeiron"can mean boundless, but it can also meansomething circular, something involved in itself and returning toitself—like a ring. Thus no difference exists in this respect betweenMelissus and Parmenides. The sad fact is that Theophrastus was aschoolmaster who applied his concept of the apeiron blindly.

We still come across interpretations of this kind in the eight-eenth century. An historiography30 in the authentic sense of theword occurs first hi the nineteenth century, a writing of history31

that distinguishes itself from the doxographic tradition. Theinteresting thing is that, as we have seen, despite all of its sensi-tivity, despite its immense erudition and its study of sources, eventhis historiography does not remain free of naive anachronism,even when it deals with fundamental themes. I admire the greatphilologists of the nineteenth century, their mastery of researchmethods, their extremely comprehensive education. But it is alsoa form of superior creativity when one is able to see things underthe influence of one's own expertise and, in doing so, find one'seyes and ears opened.

This truly happens in Hegel when at the beginning of theLogic he brings to the table being, nothing, and becoming in the

30. Historiographie31. Geschichtsschreibung


sense of the tradition established by Kant's and Fichte's doctrineof categories. Perhaps Heidegger was right when he said that, allin all, this nothing is no true nothing and also that becoming isalready implied in the concepts of being and nothing. Being is"posited" as something indefinite. As we know, in his inauguralFreiburg lecture, "What is Metaphysics?," Heidegger directed hisattention (just as he did in Being and Time) to precisely thispoint—that the nothing is like the veil of being and that this noth-ing does not resemble anything that is32 but rather being, whichthe multiplicity of existing things33 leaves behind itself like a veil.Here, Heidegger apparently feels himself drawn toward Par-menides. Parmenides, too, goes beyond the multiplicity of exist-ing things and places to eon34 at the beginning. In a way, this toeon expresses Heidegger's "ontological difference." Yet we haveabused this expression to such an extent that it has becomeincomprehensible. "Ontological difference"—I still recall quitedearly how, in Marburg, the young Heidegger developed thisconcept of die "ontological difference" in the sense of the differ-ence between being and beings, between ousia and on. One day,as Gerhard Kriiger and I accompanied Heidegger home, one ofthe two of us two raised the question of what, then, the signifi-cance of this ontological distinction was, how and when one mustmake this distinction. I will never forget Heidegger's answer:Make? Is the ontological difference something that must bemade? That is a misunderstanding. This difference is not some-thing introduced by the philosopher's thinking so as to distin-guish between being and beings. — Our reading of Parmenides'didactic poem, I believe, makes it quite clear that Heidegger wascorrect in this matter. The ontological difference [just] is; it is notintroduced [by us], but rather opens itself up. As a matter of fact,in the didactic poem there is a back and forth between that whichis, in its totality, and being. The ontological difference is not yetnamed here, but in a certain sense it is already operative. And thatis one of the reasons why Heidegger, like Plato before him, felt anespecially deep regard for old Parmenides. Heidegger, as we havealready indicated, hoped and attempted to prove that Parmenideshad already suspected that there was this difference, a difference

32. etwas Seiendem33. seienden Dinge34. being


that is not made but which occurs on it own. For this reason, hetook the trouble to steer the interpretation in this direction, andin the course of this he also did violence to the text. For example,when he interprets the passage in the Proem in which the unshak-able heart of truth and the opinions of mortals is discussed, Hei-degger tries to prove that standing in the background here is thatgreat problem, the miracle of self-differentiation. To grasp theOne is something normal, but what does this have to do with thecapacity for differentiation? This is already presupposed in theCreation that the Old Testament relates because the most varie-gated existing things are held apart from each other, and this isalso the case with us when we perceive. Heidegger tried to find allof this in Eleatic philosophy and also in Heraclitus so as to thenclaim—in all too close a connection with Nietzsche—that the firstphilosophers of the classical period of Greece stood beyond meta-physics and that the great drama of Western thinking, the fall intothe abyss of metaphysics, was not there at all in Presocratic phi-losophy. Heidegger later realized that the West was already devel-oping toward that time,35 and with regard to this point I wouldlike to recall something that I said at the beginning of these lec-tures, namely, that even epic poetry was already very far removedfrom the mythology of the early epoch and presented somethingquite different from a religious proclamation of the divine.Homer and Hesiod were more like enlightened intellectuals andgreat psychologists. Think, for instance, of the scene at the begin-ning of the Iliad where Achilles, out of fury over Agamemnon'sdemand that he hand over his slave, seizes his sword and... sud-denly the face of Athena looms up behind Agamemnon. At thelast minute, Achilles regains his self-control and puts the swordinto its scabbard again. A double action occurs here: there isAthena, who restrains Achilles, and there is Achilles, whorestrains himself; there is a reference to the divine, but genuineinteriority also plays a role, which of course is not yet named assuch; nevertheless it is present in Homer's lines and is able to saysomething to us. This one example suffices to make clear thegreatness of poetry as well as the fact that, despite the great dis-tance, we still recognize ourselves in a view of a world like thatof the Olympian gods or that of the disputes among the gods thatHesiod portrayed.

35. I.e., toward the fall into the abyss of metaphysics.


In closing, I would like to make yet one further remark aboutHeidegger. In my opinion, he has placed Hegel at the end of thehistory of the metaphysics. In a certain sense, Hegel's synthesis isnot to be surpassed. The fall from the conceptual level attained innineteenth-century philosophy begins with the most brilliantthinker of the later part of the century, with Nietzsche. Certainly,he was in many ways almost a dilettante who did not understandmuch of modern philosophy and had not even read Kant butmerely Kuno Fischer instead. The collapse of a still living traditionand its transformation in the history of philosophy in the sense ofbecoming a sequence of philosophical systems is extremely signif-icant. In the nineteenth century it was regarded as a point d'hon-neur—and at the beginning our own century it was no different—that a system is a necessary prerequisite of philosophy. In anycase, we can recognize how truly radical a thinker Heidegger iswhen he claims that metaphysics has changed and that it has shift-ed from being the common horizon of the Western culture tobeing a new metaphysics, a metaphysics that he designates "theforgetfulness of being" and describes in terms of the dominationof technology in all areas of human culture, and certainly not justin Europe but in the whole world. Heidegger has thus seen manythings in a new way that has opened new possibilities of thinkingfor us as well as the possibility of letting the texts of philosophythat have been handed down—and the language of art—speak forthemselves. It is as if a new atmosphere originated with him.Admittedly, finding one's way around in this new atmosphere andfollowing one's own path does not come easily. This is why I liketo say that, just as Plato was no Platonist, neither can Heideggerbe held responsible for the Heideggerians.

Index

Academy, Plato's, 40, 54, 75alphabetic writing, introduction of,

14-15anamnesis (Greek: memory, recol-

lection), 29,44Anaxagoras (499-422 B.C.E., Pre-

socratic philosopher), 15,51-52, 76-78

Anaximander (610-547 B.C.E, Pre-socratic philosopher), 35, 38,76-78, 80, 85-92,100-102,104,108,122

Anaximenes (588-524 B.C.E., Pre-socratic philosopher), 35,76-77, 80, 85, 87-90

Anfang (German: beginning), 4, 8,13

anima (Latin: soul), 37,47, 57, 96Antiphon (480-411 B.C.E., Greek

Sophist), 81Apollodorus (second century B.C.E.,

Athenian scholar), 35arche (Greek: beginning), 12, 86,

88Archimedes (267P-212 B.C.E.,

Greek mathematician), 24Aristotelian, 12, 27-28, 32, 34-35,

43,48-49, 60, 62, 65, 69, 72,74-77, 80-87, 93-94

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E., Greekphilosopher), 7,10,13,16,24-27,32-36,44,47-48,53-55, 57, 63, 65, 68-69,71-86, 88, 90, 94, 96, 99,104,108-110,119-121

Asia Minor, 9, 90astronomy, 39, 73Athens, 39,47, 63Atomists (school of Greek philoso-

phy associated with Democri-tus), 40

bebaios (Greek: firm, steady), 112,117

Being and Time (Heidegger), 70,123

Berlin historical school, 12biology, 39,45, 73, 78,105Boeder, Heribert, 118Brucker, Johann Jakob (1696-

1770, German philologist),122

Buddhism, 87, 89Burnet, John (1863-1928, British

philosopher), 79

Calogero, Guido (1904—, contem-porary Italian philosopher),118

Cebes (character in Plato's Phaedo),39,44-45, 50

Christianity, 12,26, 37, 73, 92,115,117

Church Fathers (early Christianwriters), 33

Clement of Alexandria (150-215,Christian Gnostic philoso-pher), 111

Cohen, Hermann (1842-1918,German philosopher), 25

Index 127

Confessions (Augustine), 92,117Copenhagen school, 27copula (use of verb "to be"), 14,

110-111cosmogony, 52, 77-78, 87-89, 92,

108cosmos, 44, 52, 63, 76, 89,100,

121; cosmology, 52, 78, 81,103

craftsperson, 43, 73-75, 81, 84-85Creation, the, 52, 73-74, 92,115,

124Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 52cultural development, 9culture, 9-12,16, 20-21, 28, 31,

39, 46, 69, 77, 92, 96, 98,116,119,125

De anima (Aristotle), 47, 57, 96death, 10,13, 37, 39-45, 55-57,

59demiurge, 73, 84Democritus (460P-370? B.C.E.,

Greek philosopher of atomisttheory of universe), 24, 65, 89

Descartes, Rene (1596-1650,French philosopher), 20, 30

dialectic, 11-13, 26,28,43,47-48, 52, 57-58, 64, 66, 68,74,84,94,115,118

Diels, Hermann (1848-1922, Ger-man philosopher), 33-34, 77,91, 95-97

Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833-1911,German philosopher), 16,19,22-24, 28, 30, 77

Diogene d'Apollonie (Laks), 79Diogenes Laertius (third century

Greek biographer), 7, 72Diogenes of Apollonia (fifth centu-

ry B.C.E., Greek philosopher),78, 85, 89

Dionysus, cult of, 38Dirlmeier, Franz (1904—, German

philosopher), 87Discours de la method (Descartes),

30doxa (Greek: opinion), 62, 98-99,

109

doxai broton (Greek: opinions ofmortals), 95,100

doxography, 47, 62, 72, 79-80,85, 88,122

dynamis (Greek: that which pro-duces effects), 65, 84-85

Echecrates (character in Plato'sPhaedo), 45

eidos (Greek: form, that which canbe seen), 12, 54

Elea (ancient Greek city in today'ssouthern Italy), 22, 63-64

FJeatic (school of philosophy inElea, exemplified by Par-menides and Zeno), 40, 56,63-64, 72, 75-77, 84, 90-91,93-94, 98,109,118-119,124

Empedocles (fifth century B.C.E.,Greek philosopher who origi-nated the doctine of the fourelements), 34, 38, 61, 64, 76,89

Encyclopedia (Hegel), 69Enlightenment, the (eighteenth-

century philosophical/ culturalmovement), 15

Ephesus (ancient Greek city in AsiaMinor, located in present-dayTurkey; home of Heraclitus),9,22,95,110

epic literature, 13,15epic poetry, 90, 95,105,124Epicharmus (fl. c. 450 B.C.E., Greek

poet), 61epistemology (study of knowl-

edge), 22, 30, 53,120etymology, 103,108Euclid (third century B.C.E., Greek

mathematician), 24Euthyphro (Plato), 59evolution, theory of, 29, 39existence, 14, 30,42, 45, 51, 75,

103, 111, 113-114experience, 16-18,23,25,28-29,

40,42,44,46, 50, 53-54,56-57, 65, 98-99,113,115,120

128 Index

Fabricius, Johann Albert(1668-1736, German Luther-an scholar), 122

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb(1762-1814, German idealistphilosopher), 43,123

fire, 41, 55-56,102-104,108Fischer, Kuno (1824-1907, Ger-

man philosopher), 125Foucault, Michel (1926-1984,

contemporary French philoso-pher), 17

Frank, Erich (1883-1949, Germanphilosopher), 48

Frankel, Hermann (1888-?, Ger-man philosopher), 120

freedom, 26-27

Gaiser, Konrad (contemporaryGerman philosopher), 11

Galelei, Galileo (1564-1642, Ital-ian astronomer), 24

geometry, 66German idealism, 57,110German poetry, 14Gomperz, Theodor (1832-1912,

German philosopher), 77Gottingen, university of, 10Greek culture, 9,20, 98Greek gods, 35, 90,122Greek Philosophers, The (Burnet),

79Greek poetry, 14, 93

harmony, 23,44-45, 53, 88Hartmann, Nicolai (1882-1950,

German philosopher), 27-28heavenly bodies, 73-74,76,

103-104Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

(1770-1831, German philoso-pher), 7,10-12,18-22,26,35,43,46, 67-69,103,120,122,125

Hegelian, Hegelianism, 10-11,19,21-22,25, 35,46,57, 66-67,69,93,103

Heidegger, Martin (1889-1976,German philosopher), 7,13,

80, 86-88,109, 111, 117,123-125

Heidelberg, university of, 7-9Hellenism (spread of Greek culture

and thought after Alexanderthe Great in fourth centuryB.C.E.), 24, 73

Heracleides Ponticus (390-322B.C.E., Greek philosopher andastronomer), 39

Heraclitus (540-475 B.C.E., Greekphilosoher born in Ephesus),21,25, 34-35, 61, 64,93,95,110,114-115,124

hermeneutics (theory of interpreta-tion), 19,21,29,46,102

Herodotus (fifth century B.C.E.,Greek historian), 36

Hesiod (fl. eighth century B.C.E.,Greek poet), 13, 36, 63, 65,93-94, 96,107,124

historicism, 7,10,15-16,21-22,24, 93, 95,110,114-115

historiography, 12,22,35-36,77,122

history of philosophy, 10-11,19-21,25, 58,125

Homer (fl. 850 B.C.E., Greek epicpoet), 7,10,13,15,36-38,55, 61, 63, 93-95,113,116,118,124

human sciences, 16,23-24, 29-31Husserl, Edmund (1859-1938,

German philosopher), 70hyle, (Greek: matter; originally:

wood, forest), 8, 65, 79, 81,83

Idea (Platonic concept), 11,17,20,36,38-41,43,45,48,52-56,58,67-68,77, 85,87-89,99,104-105, 111

Idea of the Good in Platonic andAristotelian Philsophy, The(Gadamer), 48

idealism, 35, 57, 68,110,120Iliad (Homer), 98,124immortality of the soul, 41-45,47,

55-56,58-59

Index 129

incipience, 17, 38indeterminacy, 18Introduction to the Human Sci-

ences (Dilthey), 16,24Ionia (ancient Greek region in Asia

Minor along coast of AegeanSea), 64, 83, 85, 87, 93,101-105,108,112

Jaeger, Werner (1888-1961, Ger-man philosopher), 36, 86-87,89

Joel, Karl (1864-1934, Germanphilosopher), 96

Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804, Ger-man philosopher), 11,22,27,41,43, 52,123,125

Karsten, Simon (1802-1864, Ger-man philologist), 97

Kierkegaard, S0ren (1813-1855,Danish philosopher), 67

Kramer, Hans-Joachim (1929—,German philosopher), 11

Kruger, Gerhard (1902-1972, Ger-man philosopher), 123

Laks, Andre (contemporary Frenchphilosopher), 79

language, 7-8,10,13-15, 21,25,29, 34, 42,46, 53, 58, 62, 89,121,125

Lectures on the History of Philoso-phy (Hegel), 10

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm(1646-1766, German philoso-pher), 27,44

logos (Greek: word, account),11-12,17, 35-36,46, 53, 55,60, 62, 72-73, 94,109-110,117

Luther, Martin (1483-1546, Ger-man religious reformer), 26,92

Lysis (Plato), 47-48

manotes (Greek: thinning, rarefy-ing), 76

Marburg, university of, 13,123

mathematics, 25, 39,41,48,54,56-57, 60, 66, 73

matter, theory of, 25, 30, 65,73-74, 80-82,116,123

me on (Greek: non-being, nothing),84

Meister Eckhart (1260-1327, Ger-man theologian, mystic), 58

Melissus (fifth century B.C.E. Greekphilosopher), 118,122

memory, 29, 37-38,50,98Meno (Plato), 41Metaphysics (Aristotle), 16, 35,47,

69, 72, 75, 78-79, 84-85,104method, 30-31; methodology, 10,

22Middle Ages, 24, 96Milesian school, 35, 72, 78, 88,

98,100,102,108,121Miletus (ancient Greek city in Asia

Minor, located in present-dayTurkey), 9, 35, 80, 90

Mill, John Stuart (1806-1873,British Utilitarian philoso-pher), 30

modern science, 15,28, 57, 69-70,82

Mondolfo, Rodolfo (contemporaryItalian philosopher), 21

moral questions, 28Mount Olympus, 65, 92music, 23mythos (Greek: tale, story), 17,

35-36, 88, 90,117myths, 16, 38,47, 64, 73-74,

78-80, 88,108

National Socialism, 24natural sciences, 22-23,27-31nature, 8,12,16,26,29, 31, 34,

42-45, 50, 53, 71, 73-77, 79,81-82, 84, 92, 97,99,101,121

Neoplatonism, 54neuter gender, use of, 14Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm

(1844-1900, German philoso-pher), 7,14, 37-38,46, 86,96,101,124-125

130 Index

Nomoi (Plato's Laws), 66-67notnos (Greek: law, convention),

34,74non-being, 19,95-96,109,

114-115,120non-existence, 30nous (Greek: mind), 19, 51-52,

57, 66, 83-84, 91,103,105,112

numbers, 38, 54, 56, 64,72-74

objectivity, 30-31Old Testament, 73,115,124Olympian gods, 124One, the, 91,112,118,121,124ontology (philosophy of being),

14,43, 51,54, 65,68-69, 85,123

opinion, 12,14, 50, 61-62, 85,95, 98,102,104,115,118,120,125

Orphic rites, 38

Paideia (Jaeger), 36Paris, univeristy of, 10Parmenides (515-450 B.C.E.,

founder of Eleatic school ofGreek philosophy), 14,21,25, 35, 38, 58,61,63, 67-68,75-76, 79, 91-99,101,103-112,114,116-120,122-123

Peripatetics (school of Greek phi-losophy founded by Aristotle),33

Phaedo (Plato), 34, 36-42,45, 50,56-57, 59-61, 66, 68, 71-73,85, 91,113

phenomenology (philosophicalstudy of appearances inhuman experience,), 11,28,57, 68, 80

Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel),11

Philebus (Plato), 56, 83Philolaos (b. 470 B.C.E., Greek

philosopher), 39Philosophical Investigations

(Wittgenstein), 61

Philosophy in the Tragic Age ofthe Greeks (Nietzsche), 86

Physics (Aristotle), 13,34-35,47,53, 55, 72-73, 75-76, 80-86,90,96

physis (Greek: nature, being), 8,34-35,44, 74.75, 81, 84-85,90,105

Plato (428-348 B.C.E., Greekphilosopher), 7,10-12,14-15,24, 32-34, 36-45,47-49, 51, 53-59, 61, 63-68,71-76, 79-81, 83-85, 92, 94,96,109-110,112,116,119,121,123,125

Plato and the So-called Pythagoreans(Frank), 39

Platonic dialogue, 49Platonic, Platonism, 10-12,15,29,

32, 34,48-50, 52,56,58, 62,67-68,73-74, 82, 94,99,109,125

Popper, Karl (1902—, Britishphilosopherof science), 24-26

Presocratics, 7, 9-13,17-18,20,22-23,25, 32-36, 38-40,44,56, 62, 64-65, 72,79, 82,94-95,118,121,124

principium (Latin: beginning),12-13,15,18,29,71-72

Problemgeschichte (German: prob-lem history), 20,25

Protagoras (490-410 B.C.E., GreekSophist), 61

Pseudo-Dionysius (unknown Neo-platonist author of mysticaltreatises, around 500 C.E.)67

psyche (Greek: soul, mind), 41, 58puknotes (Greek: condensing),

76purification, 38,41purity rituals, 41Pythagoras, 38, 90, 93Pythagoreans, 39,44, 54,56,65,

76, 83-84

quantum mechanics, 28quantum theory, 27

Index 131

reincarnation, 38,45Reinhardt, Karl (contemporary

German philosopher), 14,118repetition, theme of, 97,100,114,

116-117,119,122Republic (Plato), 48rhapsode (reciter of epic poetry),

36, 63, 90-91, 96,116rheontes (Greek: flux), 62, 65rhetoric, 26,43, 74Robin, Leon (1866-1947, French

philosopher), 12Romanticism (philosophical and

cultural movement of the lateeighteenth century), 10,12,20,121

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905-1980,French existentialist philoso-pher), 31

Scheler, Max (1874-1928, Germanphenomenologist), 27-28

Schleiermacher, Friedrich(1768-1834, German theolo-gian), 10-12,16,20,22

Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860,German philosopher), 86-87,101

Science of Logic (Hegel), 11Seele (German: soul), 37self-consciousness, 19,57, 68-69,

120senses, 12, 41, 60, 71; sensory

experience, 42, 44, 53Simmias (character in Plato's

Phaedo), 39,42,44-45, 58Simplicius (sixth-century Neopla-

tonist and commentator onAristotle), 7, 34, 52, 76,86-87,107,117

Skeptics (school of Greek philoso-phy), 33

Snell, Bruno (1896—, Germanphilologist), 14

Socrates (469-399 B.C.E., Greekphilosopher), 36-37,39-45,47-48,50-53,55,57-59,61,63-64, 73, 78, 83, 91,113

Sophist (Plato), 43,60,62-63,

65-68,71-72,75,77,79, 81,85, 94,112

Sophists (wandering Greek teach-ers of fifth century B.C.E.), 40,54,61

spirit, 11,16,20, 50, 66, 68stasiotai (Greek: those who take a

stand), 62, 65Stephanus (Henri Estienne, 1531-

1598, French scholar andprinter of Greek classics), 122

Stoicism (Greek and Roman phi-losophy founded by Zeno ofCitium), 26, 33,104,108

structure, philosophical concept inKant and Dilthey, 20-22

subject and object, 31,120Summa Theologia (Aquinas), 96

ta enantia (Greek: in opposition toeach other), 101

tecbne (Greek: art, skill), 34,74-75,79, 82

teleology (theory of ends or goal-oriented activity), 16,22, 53

Thales (648-546 B.C.E., earlyGreek thinker from Miletus),7,10,13,15-16, 35, 65, 76,78-80, 85-87, 89-90

thanatos (Greek: death), 57Theatetus (Plato), 51, 60-62,

65-66, 68, 71-72, 94,109,119

Theogony (Hesiod), 36,65, 96,107

Theology of the Early CreekThinkers, The (Jaeger), 36, 86

Ttmaeus (Plato), 67, 73-74,80-81,104

to auto (Greek: the same, identi-cal), 111

to ison (Greek: equality), 44Topics (Aristotle), 25-26,29transmigration of the soul, 38,56Tubingen school, 11

unity, 18,31,51,64, 66, 85,90,98,101,105-106, 111, 113,118,121

132 Index

universe, 29, 52-53, 63, 69,73-74, 85-93, 97-101,103-104,108,113,118,121-122

Untersteiner, Mario (1899-1981,Italian philosopher), 61

values, 27-28, 31, 53, 70, 74, 86,91, 94-96, 99

Viennese school, 77virtue, 27-28,48, 65, 90, 97virtuality, 18

Weber, Max (1864-1920, Germansociologist), 17

Weltgeschichte (German: worldhistory), 46

Whitehead, Alfred North(1861-1947, British philoso-pher), 61

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889-1951,Austrian philosopher), 61

world-soul, 68,73

Xenophanes (570-470 B.C.E.,Greek philosopher), 36, 63,72,77, 90-91,96

Teller, Eduard (1814-1908, neo-Kantian German philosopher),12,19, 21-22, 35

Zeno of Elea (490-430 B.C.E., dis-ciple of Parmenides), 112,118

Hans-Georg Gadamer the Beginning of Philosophy 2000

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