Customer Reviews

Parmenides (Studies in Continental Thought)

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I bought this book in some ways by mistake, not being familiar with Heidegger beyond an abortive attempt at "Being and Time" some two decades ago. I was more interested in Parmenides than Heidegger, but decided I'd see what he had to say about the mysterious pre-Socratic.

If one is looking for a 'traditional' study of Parmenides, look elsewhere. The book examines a few lines at most, concentrating on the etymology of ancient Greek words and ideas, their translation through Latin to German (and now English . . .) and how this relates to Heidegger's obsession with Dasein.

And I didn't mind a bit. I'll need another work to analyze Parmenides' thought and his poem, but as an introduction to Heidegger this was brilliant - so much so that I've purchased another 7 of the lecture courses. Loving ancient Greek helps in this regard. Although I do question some of Heidegger's interpretations and translations, I do not know how much of this is due to the translation of German to English rather than Greek to German.

I also purchased Yannaras' On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite, as I think some of his thought concerning Being is more related to Patristic and Orthodox theology of apophasis than any humanist philosophy I've encountered.

But that's my obsession. How strange to discover I enjoy reading Heidegger!

Hiedegger's thought has been developed and published in hundred of volumes.For us ,non academics, it is almost impossible to access all this "treasury" and we have to try some of Heidegger's most popular books.
In fact this book is one of the very few ,that gives you the chance in understanding the roots of Heidegger's philosophical program.It is not just an analysis of Parmenides and Heraclitus Heidegger's favourite themes of unconcealment and presence,but reader will have the pleasure in finding philosophical basics bulding Heidegger's conception of Technology,Phenomenology & Art.

The "Parmenides and Heraclitus" lecture course of 1942-3 is decisive for understanding the relationship between the Greek experience of truth as a-letheia and Heidegger's exposition of Being in Being and Time (the lecture on Plato's Sophist is equally important). This lecture course also helps to clarify Heidegger's relationship with Nietzsche and is essential for a confrontation with the Nietzsche lectures (sp. Heidegger's characterization of the will to power as the will to will). In addition, although Heidegger rarely mentions Hegel directly, this lecture course enters into an implicit dialogue with Hegel's lectures on the history of philosophy. Heidegger's characterization of history as the "transformation of the essence of truth" is momentous. Incidentally, Liddell-Scott defines aidos as "moral feeling, reverence, awe, respect for the feeling or opinion of others or for one's own conscience, and so shame, self-respect." In fact in the detailed analysis it goes so far as to say "personified, Reverence, Pi.O.7.44," that is, it specifically defines the "aidos" mentioned by Heidegger in the 7th Olympian Ode as the personification of reverence. Undermining Heidegger's so-called linguistic analysis/exegesis on the basis of his affiliation with Nazism or Catholocism is a sign of the refusal to take Heidegger's comments to heart.

Heidegger conducts a brilliant tour of Parmenides' fragments, with boatloads of illuminating detours through nearly all of Greek philosophy and history, and much of Western history as well. His insights into the nature of Greek gods and myth, truth as "un-concealment" or "dis-closure", and the development of human thought are indispensable. At times, however, he takes undue liberties - his interpretation of aidos (shame) as "reverence" is particularly far from the mark. As always, the prose is dense, but worth slogging through.

This series of lectures was delivered just after the war, after Heidegger's naive brush with brutish politics, and more significantly, it was written after he had completed his in-depth ruminations in Contributions to Philosophy (enowning) and Mindfulness. His perspective was now complete, its formulations fresh and fully formed. The Parmenides lectures thus exhibited the thinker fresh and brimming with the power of his incisiveness and devotion to the inceptual moment.
This book begins with a translation of Parmenides' poem but then launches off into a riff, more like a classical variation on a theme, that teases out the inceptual thinking that these simple words in a poem would hide from the contemporary reader's sensibilities.
Here many of the deep connections between aletheia and lethe, his guiding themes, are presented with lucid power; his connecting of the notions of the gaze, thea (as in "theater) and thea (as in goddess) is striking as an account of the experiencing of the gods. His description of the polis as a gathering and playing forth of determining meaning among the people opens out onto a new vision of our communally shaped meanings. He culminates in an elucidation of the sense of the "open" by contrasting his sense of the term with that of Rilke (in the Eighth Duino Elegy). This rendition of the term flows directly from his expansive opening of the term "be-ing" in his grounding works, mentioned above.
Every page was philosophically thrilling. Anyone who is ready to leap into the potency of thought to revive our human endeavor will value the encounter offered in this book.

The official title of this series of lectures is "Parmenides and Heraclitus". Although Heraclitus quickly slips out of the picture, and Heidegger often gets of the track of Parmenides as well, this book offers commanding vistas not only of the pre-Socratics, but also of the question of being, the nature of the Greek gods, and all of Western history. Heidegger's interpretation of truth as "un-concealment" or "dis-closure" is truly mind-opening. A caveat though: Heidegger often takes too many liberties with Greek terms; his explanation of aidos (shame or reverence), for instance, owes more to German peasant mystical Catholicism than to anything Greek.

I'm rating this book on the basis of Aristotle's definition of truth (roughly, and not literally: "compliance of a sentence to the event/object it describes"). If it were named, for example "My Philosophy's Partial Digest" I would award it three stars.

Suppose you purchase, say, a volume by Russell titled "Leibniz". You open it, and after a few pages consisting mostly of excerpts from "The Monadology", you find the rest (say 95%) of the tome contains the notes for a course on Russell's ramified theory of types. How would you rate the book?
Well, for one you aren't interested in the content: you already have read about the theory, say in the Principia. You were besides deceived by the title: this book isn't about Leibniz at all. So, zero stars*.
On the other hand, the exposition is good and interesting, and contains some new material you hadn't heard of before. Three stars for that (if you're as avaricious with stars as I am).

This is exactly the situation for Heidegger's "Parmenides". After quoting the opening verses of the poem, H., with the pretext that Parmenides was brought before the Goddess of Truth, launches himself into a résumé of some of his favourite topics: the ethimology of "aletheia" and many other words, the reinterpretation of Plato's "The Republic" cave allegory, the history of how Western metaphysics lost its way after the Presocratics, the resulting "appropriative" and "calculating" ways of thought and comportment ("behaviour" for the uninitiated) that we inherited, how the idealistic Europe is (was?) squeezed between the two materialistic ideologies (capitalism and bolshevism) of America and Russia, etc. As these lectures were given in 1942/43, they present his position after his "kehre".
The novelty (for me; I haven't read all of his books) is that here H. dedicates some space to explain the Roman Imperial and ecclesiastical traditions' influence on the process whereby the Greek "pseüdos" became our "false", "unconcealedness" our "rightness", and "truth as presence" our propositional definition (it's more complex than that, of course, but for brevity's sake, let is stand.). Also, I wasn't acquainted with his extremely interesting reinterperetation of the concept of "daimones" (language is so ambiguous ... . Might the meaning H. attributes to the word have really been common usage in Parmenides' -or for that matter Aristotle's- time?).

What else? The book, as all of H.'s, is written in his customary convoluted style (why does he -and all his translators into the languages I know- for example use "unconceledness" when "dis-covery" -or better still, "the dis-covering"- would render his meaning as well, and even better**? The text doesn't have notes or an index, as he thought that he was not teaching but pointing to a possible way of enquiry. Etc. Anybody familiar with his writings will know what I mean.

So, for anybody acquainted with H.'s other writings, this (with apologies to H. enthusiasts) is definitely a secondary option. For people who wish instead to gain a first-hand acquaintance with him, it's not a bad place to start -although in some very few places it presupposes familiarity with "Being and Time"'s Dasein-, as it is a relatively short book, contains many repetitions and recapitulations (the lectures were obviously conceived for relative novices) presenting the same points using different words and turns of phrase, etc. So for a beginner my recommendation would be "definitely buy it for H.'s sake, although don't expect to learn anything about what Parmenides wrote". All the more so as it allows an insight into the man's beliefs: this was a series of lectures delivered during WW2, at a time when the tide was turning against Germany. Yet there isn't a single demeaning word about the Russians or the Anglo-Saxons (nor of course against the Jews), except for the ironic comment that the word "trick" comes, as was to be expected, from the English language. On the other hand, beginners shouldn't take too seriously H.'s etimology, which in some cases (i.e. polis from polein) is known to be false.

I can't resist adding (though it's irrelevant to the book's merits or lack of them) that at one point H. takes a jibe at Göbbels: after extolling Germany as the country of "dichter und denker", he remarks "Instead, the Reich Propaganda Minister said the other day that what the German people need is grain and oil, not poets and thinkers". Quite daring. I wonder if this was typical of the latitude Germans were allowed under Hitler, or on the contrary whether it was the time when one of his pupils, after the end of the lecture, told him that he was an SS officer and that he (H.) should be more cautious about his words, as somebody might refer to them in the wrong places.


* I have reviewed two other books on Parmenides that stick to their subject matter, so it wouldn't be fair to them if I rated this one on that part of its content that doesn't refer to Parmenides' doctrine.

** Perhaps this is due to the fact that H. (as was his custom) appropriated without acknowledgment Marburg's Hartmann's 1908 analysis of "aletheia", in which the concept of "discovery" was explicitly mentioned, and he didn't want to draw attention to his peccadillo. For more details about this, refer to a very interesting book "The Prophets and the Messiah" by the Spanish philosopher Gil Villegas, about the intellectual relationship of Lukáks, Ortega y Gasset and Heidegger, which unfortunately I don't think has been (yet?) translated into English.