Parmenide

by Martin Heidegger

In questo corso universitario, tenuto a Friburgo nel semestre invernale 1942/1943, il nome di Parmenide sta per tutto ciò che esso rappresenta: il pensiero aurorale dei greci quale inizio e fondamento della civiltà occidentale. Heidegger orchestra una polifonia sorprendentemente ampia di motivi, in cui Parmenide diventa il pre-testo per trattare temi e problemi quali la verità, la giustizia, la politica, il divino.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, German Literature, Logic

298 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a German philosopher whose work is perhaps most readily associated with phenomenology and existentialism, although his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification. His ideas have exerted a seminal influence on the development of contemporary European philosophy. They have also had an impact far beyond philosophy, for example in architectural theory (see e.g., Sharr 2007), literary criticism (see e.g., Ziarek 1989), theology (see e.g., Caputo 1993), psychotherapy (see e.g., Binswanger 1943/1964, Guignon 1993) and cognitive science (see e.g., Dreyfus 1992, 2008; Wheeler 2005; Kiverstein and Wheeler forthcoming).

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heidegger insisted more and more that at the core of his philosophy is truth; and that the best entrance into his thinking is one centered on truth. This course/book is probably one of the best instructions to truth understood as Aletheia/Αλήθεια. Parmenides is rather a pretext here.
Heidegger starts with the Ancient Greeks and with the simpler and rather obvious meanings of truth; but continuously dismisses them as insufficient in favor of more and more deeper meanings. Eventually he ends up with αλήθεια understood as the open and free space of the clearing of Being. The bad guys here are first Plato and Aristotle who entertained some alternative understanding of truth centered on ideas and located inside the soul. The Roman translation and popularization of the Greek’s Αλήθεια was the second disaster. Christianity and the medieval period just mixed these two failures and perpetuated them further. Modernity with Descartes, Kant, Hegel and so on were responsible for the third failure. The last failure is anticipated and initiated by Nietzsche, and culminates in modern technology.
The best parts of this book are those connected with Oblivion/Lethe/Λήθη in Ancient Greek, Plato’s Republic, and in the understanding of the entire history since those times as a deeper and deeper entrenchment into Oblivion. A second best are those sections on the centrality of visual approaches to Being in Ancient Greek (i.e., ideas, light, sun, gaze, view, and so on) that still carry to these days. The book ends in style by taking down Rilke (i.e., a favorite of Heidegger in his youth) as a simple follower of Nietzsche.



Original March 2022 review:

There is not much about Parmenides in this book. The book starts by discussing Parmenides' “didactic poem”, but it soon stops with αλήθεια's original meaning and its later translation/miss-interpretations. Parmenides is just a pretext for Heidegger to cover the entire history of Being - especially towards Greek's first beginning, αλήθεια, and λήθη.
This is probably the book where Heidegger is presenting his conception of truth understood as αλήθεια the best; that is in great details, depths, and implications. To him, every translation is an interpretation; but the Roman assimilation of the Greek inception along with its Latin translation got it completely wrong. Christianity and modernity took this Roman misunderstanding further and towards its present consummation. Plato and Aristotle partially departed from the Greek beginning and started this fall into metaphysics.
The sections about “theory”, “oblivion”, “typewriting”, “hands”, “sight”, “daimonion”, Plato's river (i.e., Λήθη) standing for the oblivion of Being, Plato's Politeia standing for the location of Being, and a few other - are quite amazing.

[Raquel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Formalmente, o livro é belo. Frases cheias daquele sexto sentido que tão bem caracteriza Heidegger.
Em termos de substância, o tema centra centra-se na "verdade". A referência primodial situa-se no poema doutrinário de Parmênides [filósofo grego pré-socrático] que, a par do grande Heráclito, procura perceber a génese daquilo que é "verdadeiro ". Com esta obra Heidegger procurou sintetizar os paradigmas que se foram sucedendo no entendimento da " verdade " e "não-verdade", partindo da filosofia grega até à latinização do Ocidente. A obra tem como ponto de partida o misterioso pensamento de Parmênides, mas explora muitos outros pensadores e aborda variadas concepções.

[Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

To have followed Heidegger's program through the labyrinth of his earlier work to his later, enigmatic stage is to stand in awe of his contributions to the supreme riddle of metaphysics: the nature of Being. Through a series of lectures predicated loosely on readings of Parmenides' didactic poem, Heidegger examines the pre-metaphysical Greek experience of truth, or αλήθεια, as unconcealment and presence. For Heidegger, truth in the originary Greek sense occurs in our encounters with beings as an event where concealment is removed to allow beings to be revealed, or "making manifest that which in some sense lies hidden." In this sense concealment and unconcealment are not merely the properties of an object or aspects of human experience, but primordial phenomena and basic features of Being that humans both are and participate in. Through Parmenides, he arrives at the essence of truth, thought with the Greek mind, as a bringing to presence through a state of being unconcealment and experiencing unconcealment as an event. Heady stuff. As is to be expected with Heidegger, all roads lead back to a primal mystery of Being thought properly only by the Presocratics, a post-metaphysical puzzle that is practically impossible to think but makes for some highly compelling reading.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

For one thoroughly indoctrinated in Heideggerian phenomenology, this work is nothing short of exhilarating. It offers some of the most revealing glimpses at Heidegger's thought process as he undertakes a close reading of the scant existing fragments of the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides. The classroom setting, while much more critical in the volume dedicated to Heraclitus, manages to convey the sense of being taught or instructed, rather than spoken at, and this certainly helps the reader follow Heidegger through the rigorous program of intellectual gymnastics common to all his work.

It is important to note that this seminar, along with much of his work in the 1940s, is the direct result of concerns he developed in the mid to late 1930s, when he disengaged from direct confrontations with the likes of Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, and fell victim to the seductive texts of the pre-Socratics and Nietzsche - the very beginning and the very end of metaphysics, respectively. Works like Contributions to Philosophy and Mindfulness underscored his growing fascination with the blind, infantile grasping of the originary thought of the oldest of the ancients, and in Parmenides it becomes much clearer exactly why this is the case as he articulates not only the inner workings of the texts of Parmenides, but the implications of interpreting this work on history, which, for Heidegger, consists of tracing the essence of truth as we Westerners meandered farther and farther from being and truth as such.

The end of this process is Nietzsche, who decried the role of the church in striking the final blow against the originary truths of the ancients through its appropriation and self-serving reinterpretation of the Greeks. But the process began here, with the pre-Socratics' initial attempts to understand their world, and the subsequent diluting of this thought through various cultural, political, and historical filters. For a man whose primary concern was the overcoming of metaphysics as understood by the lay-philosopher, Parmenides and his peers stood as a fount of fecundity of thought and inspiration in preparation for the 'leaping-forth' heralded in Contributions. For Heidegger, only an understanding of previous origins can truly inform the attempt to establish new ones.

[Zeb Haradon · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book barely talks about Parmenides at all, it just uses his philosophy as a starting point to explore Heidegger's idea that the Greek concept of truth is different from ours. He mostly uses etymological arguments to do this, but does the etymology of a word really color the meaning when the people using the word are unfamiliar with the etymology? There's also a few glimpses here of Heidegger the Nazi (something I didn't see in Being and Time or Heraclitus Seminar), with typically obscure comments about the "German spirit" and "saving German culture", which probably meant something very specific to his audience in 1943 when this lecture was delivered. I was unsure about Heidegger for a while but I think this book tips the scale in the nonsense direction.

[Liedzeit Liedzeit · Rating 2 out of 5]

Parmenides und Heraklit waren, Heidegger zufolge, Denker, die das Wahre denken, was bedeuten soll, das Wahre in seinem Wesen erfahren. Kann man vielleicht so sagen. Aber sie waren auch anfängliche Denker. Was bedeutet anfänglich? „Das also Voraufgegangene und alle Geschichte Bestimmende nennen wir das Anfängliche.“, sagt Heidegger. Das Wort Voraufgegangen existiert nicht. Aber er wird seine Gründe haben, es zu verwenden. Weil es nicht in einer(!) Vergangenheit zurück-, sondern dem Kommenden vorausliegt. Keine Ahnung, was mir Heidegger da sagen soll.

Jedenfalls gibt es außer Parmenides und Heraklit auch noch Anaximander, die anfängliche Denker waren. Warum die und nicht Anaxagoras oder Anaximenes oder Empedokles verrät uns Heidegger nicht.

Kein vielversprechender Anfang, aber dann zitiert er tatsächlich aus den Fragmenten, und ich fand seine Ausführung zu der Göttin Wahrheit, nicht etwa Göttin der Wahrheit nachvollziehbar und sogar erhellend. Dann spricht er über den Begriff der Wahrheit, der eigentlich mit Unverborgenheit übersetzt werden müsste. Und dann kommt sehr viel Etymologie, und gar nicht uninteressant, und über weite Passagen verzichtet er darauf, unsinnige Neologismen einzuführen. Dass die Griechen anders dachten, zum Beispiel Odysseus bei Homer als uns Herr Voss sagt, glaube ich sogar. Dass das Wort 'falsch' undeutsch ist, nehme ich zur Kenntnis, bezweifle aber, dass das irgend eine Bedeutung hat.

Und er erzählt und erläutert und kommt von einem zum nächsten Thema. Er redet über Platon und Nietzsche und Rilke und Spengler. Über Bolschewismus und Schreibmaschinen. Nur über Parmenides nicht mehr. Einmal nach über hundert Seiten verspricht er, auf ihn zurückzukommen, aber er tut es nicht. Außer ganz am Schluss, auf der vorletzten Seite.

Ich hatte wirklich etwas über Parmenides erfahren wollen. Ich glaube, ich habe noch nie im Leben ein Buch gelesen, das so wenig mit dem Titel zu tun hatte wie dieses. Vielleicht, dachte ich, haben die Herausgeber das Parmenides genannt und Heidegger kann nichts dafür. Nein. Der nannte die Vorlesung Parmenides und Heraklit. Und der einzige, über den Heidegger noch weniger zu sagen hat als Parmenides ist Heraklit.

5/10

[So Hakim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite the title, the book actually doesn't talk about the Greek philosopher Parmenides. It only uses him as stepping stone to explain the author's philosophy.

That said, this is an important lead for anyone seeking to understand Heidegger. His concept of 'Aletheia' is thoroughly discussed -- even to the point of linguistic analysis.

Warning: the book is repetitive. Only recommended for those big into the man and his thought.

[Ammon · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the clearest accounts of what Heidegger means by "Unconcealment," particularly in the context of ancient Greek philosophy.

[Truls Ljungström · Rating 4 out of 5]

Som påpekats förut, handlar denna om sanningsbegreppet, inte om Parmenides. Heideggers argument är att sanning som sådan för grekerna inte hade falskhet utan doldhet som motsats. Sanning är ett interaktivt, inte ett statiskt, begrepp. Falskhet som sådan spårar Heidegger etymologiskt till orden för namn och lögn eller förvanskning; falskhet är alltså en missrepresentation av ett förhållande, eller ett fördunklingande. Därur följer att många försokratiker missförstås.

Parmenides presenterar flera följdslutsatser ur detta - det finns en ganska spännande diskussion om Nietzsches sanningsfokus och hans kopplingar mellan viljan till makt och sanning. Det finns ett mycket intressant slutord som ställer människans självbild som subjekt mot sanningsseendeförmågan.

På det hela taget, är det en bok med en illa vald titel. Men det är en riktigt bra bok.

[Luciana · Rating 4 out of 5]

?talvez pensar é mais importante que saber...

[Keelan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heidegger is really at his best as a classicist. These lectures are first rate.

[Carla Caro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Martin Heidegger fa un exercici hermenèutic molt interessant sobre l'essència de la veritat que esguarda el nom de la deesa del poema didàctic de Parmènides, i la seva transformació en la metafísica moderna, a saber, el pas d'albergar la il·latència a concebre's com l'adequació de les representacions racionals. Sorprèn com la re-visió de paraules gregues, analitzant els diversos sentits i traduccions possibles, dels textos presocràtics poden re-velar els orígens del pensament occidental; i cal destacar la importància de re-descobrir la història. No esperava gaudir tant d'aquesta lectura com ho he fet, i m'ha reafirmat el meu interès pels presocràtics i alhora minvat la meva "por" a llegir Heidegger.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a good Heidegger book especially since Parmenides is so often quoted by Heidegger. Like most Heidegger books the title is misleading. The book is primarily about Aletheia. It is a good read if you're a Heidegger junkie because he even grounds some terms like 'Uncanny' which plays such a big deal in Being and Time. Overall if you haven't read a lot of his books I would read something else first.

[Colm Gillis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absorbing read that was well worth sticking with despite the obviously heavy weight of the text. This really felt like you reading someone's mind. No conclusions were reached or corners were turned, the book just flowed immaculately and you came away feeling like you had experienced something special.

[Nick Poulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

A marvelous study of the first philosopher to study the nature of Being

[Doctor Moss · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not always treated as one of Heidegger's core works. It is a series of lectures given in 1942-1943, ostensibly on Parmenides and Heraclitus, but I found it to be a very helpful historical account of key themes in Heidegger's later thought: unconcealment, the open, language, and technology.

He doesn't argue for a position here -- he sets out a history. A history of truth, really a history of the corruption of truth. He takes as his starting point Paremenides' poem, and in particular "The Way of Truth", where "truth" is a translation of "aletheia".

Heidegger reconstructs aletheia through an examination of the word's history and its use in Greek literature and philosophy. His high level claim is that truth has undergone a transition and corruption. In the early Greek world, aletheia, more faithfully translated as "unconcealment", inherently reveals and "withdraws" at the same time. Truth isn't the kind of full understanding or mirroring of reality conveyed by the modern conception of truth as "correctness", correspondence between idea or word and reality.

Truth for the Greeks, in Heidegger's account, maintains a kind of autonomy. His treatment here brings together consistent themes in his later thought, in which language and art participate in the revealing of the world to us, granted to us but not exhausted by that revealing. Although not his term, I always find myself coming back to the "autonomy" of reality as something that has been banished by modern thought and technology.

Heidegger in one passage discusses the related notion of the "mysterious", saying that what is mysterious has been reduced to the "unexplained" by modern thought. Modern thought works within a way of understanding that it takes for THE way of understanding. Anything that doesn't yield to it is not inherently mysterious, just not yet explained. What is lost is the acceptance that not everything yields itself to explanation, that the very idea of understanding anything means also leaving behind a mystery, that is, anything that doesn't yield itself to that understanding -- whatever reveals also conceals.

The fatal modern mistake here is to suppose that what is mysterious is just what is currently beyond our knowledge (beyond the current reach of science). It's not that our methods haven't reached what is mysterious because our knowledge just hasn't progressed that far. It is that no matter how far we progress with our methods, precisely because of our methods, the mysterious will remain. Absolute knowledge, full transparency of reality is an illusion, an illusion born of the arrogance to think that reality fully yields itself to our understanding.

You can see here as well the connection between this sense that all can be explained and understood and the attitude of technology, that all is here for our use. Reality, in yielding itself to us, is what it is for us and nothing more. It loses its inherency in losing its mystery.

These are consistent themes through Heidegger's later writing, and the great advantage here is the coherent presentation of them via a history of truth.

In addition to elucidating his own thoughts on technology and the degradation of thinking, there is a great deal here of interest in Heidegger's account of the history of philosophy.

During the second half of the book, Heidegger presents an interpretation of Plato's Myth of Er. He understands the River Lethe in Plato's myth in the light of the contrast between aletheia as unconcealing and lethe (often translated as "forgetfulness") as "withdrawing concealment". If we understand Plato's myth in this way, his "doctrine of recollection" (which Heidegger doesn't discuss directly here) becomes something very different from the pyschological movement through knowing, forgetting, and recalling. The demonstration of recollection in the Meno then would not be understood as a recovering of innate knowledge so much as a demonstration of the dialectic as how what is true reveals itself.

This is an important book to read, I think, if we want to understand Heidegger's later thought. Taking an historical perspective allows us to see those main themes of his later thought from a different angle than some of the later more purely thematic treatments such as The Question Concerning Technology, On the Way to Language, or the Discourse on Thinking.

[Micah · Rating 4 out of 5]

"'History,' conceived essentially, that is, thought in terms of the ground of the essence of Being itself, is the transformation of the essence of truth."

Did the ancient Greeks have a primordial experience of Being as unconcealment, a kind of light that lets beings appear, each in their own way? Is this found in their myths, in their early thinkers, then as a vestige in Plato and Aristotle, to be completely lost with the Romans? Whether or not you're susceptible to Heidegger's romantic anti-modernism (I have to admit I am), his case is compelling.

And don't we have to ask if there couldn't be something "metaphysically" "the same" underlying all the subjectivistic projects of modernity? Of course Heidegger was insane to think Germany somehow was elevated above this - but to me this looks like an arbitrary element of his thinking. Maybe his interpretation of modernity is too sweeping, but when it comes to ancient Greece, it's hard to deny that he has captured something of its spirit.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lots of etymology and philology which, while interesting, can be repetitive—a judgment which can be applied to the entirety of the lecture course. Heidegger also likes to complain a lot about modernity. He doesn't like typewriters because they destroy handwriting and, therefore, the "word." Occasionally, there are some cool, insightful ideas—I particularly liked his development of the δαιμόνιος, that is, the awesomeness of the ordinary, awe in the face of what is.

[Sunblinding · Rating 5 out of 5]

An invaluable text for understanding H.'s post-Kehre thought, particularly his notions of truth, strife, the event of expropriation-appropriation (ereignis), the uncanny (unheimlich) etc. Very useful to read alongside his lectures on Heraclitus, which, as a pair, provide a skeleton key of sorts to help unlock the dense and enigmatic 'joinings' comprising his Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event).

[Stefan Meister · Rating 5 out of 5]

After my third time reading it, I tend to guess this is maybe the "best" (sorry) book about "Truth" ever written, but unfortunately also maybe the text is not really translatable out of the original German. If you are interested in the topic, give it a try, you just have to get through the slightly dry introduction to the hot stuff...

[Aiden Krysciak]

It’s summer and I don’t have the attention span to read this right now. It was really interesting so far but I only read a little tiny bit every week. Not frequently enough to really get into it. I admit defeat, for now. BUT LETS SEE YOU TAKE A CRACK AT IT WISE GUY!!

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rehashing of his point that Aristotle is often seen through the lens of Roman or a Medieval thinking as opposed to Ancient Greek as Ancient Greece saw itself.

[Lucas Sipe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read #2: "Parmenides" is a tough text and I underestimated (on the first read) how much this text contains. It is a brilliant account of truth but one needs so much in order to truly work with it. Not only in tradition but even with Heidegger. In all of my readings, this text returns as a key text. Within is the essential discourse on truth as happening, as the conflict out of the concealed which is at the heart of Heidegger's mission. One might take issue with him but understanding him means understanding this text as it's a short, rich account of late Heideggerian thinking.

A quite difficult text, even for Heidegger, for someone to work through. Ostensibly about Parmenides and his "didactic poem" - Heidegger is really using Parmenides as a jumping off point to discuss the nature of truth, primordial beginnings, and the decline in that understandings. Although short, coming in at 163 pages, the text is overflowing with insights, lessons, and exegesis that warrant further reflection.

Fundamentally, the text is an in-depth examination of how the Greeks, primarily through Parmenides and Homer but even up to Plato and Aristotle understood "truth" as "Alethia" (I cannot do Greek characters here.) Translated literally, Alethia means un-concealed but Heidegger is not content to stop there - he moves into an analysis of the false which is not, for the Greeks, the opposite of truth as un-concealed. It's what Heidegger calls the "Roman" change of alethia into truth as perception opposed to false. Following the work of his earlier period, Heidegger argues that the western metaphysical tradition has, in a sense, misunderstood or changed the original "word" of the Greeks in such a way to hide/ shroud Being. Modernity, and all the ills that follow from it, are a result of that Latinization to the west. After he argues that position, he spends a bit more time on the works of Plato and how he understood un-concealed, concealed, the open, place, and being. More than anything else, the book is a call to thinking along the way of Greek primordial thought.

At one point, Heidegger brings up one of the more common criticisms that people level against him. Basically, Heidegger reads far too much into a text, his exegesis is wild, and that he misrepresents past thinkers. The responses offered is that Heidegger refuses to be married to a mere history/ historiography of past thinkers and allows the beginning to be the beginning it's meant to be - his whole endeavor is that with the fulfillment of western metaphysics with Nihilism, we are now prepared to go back to the beginning and "see" the beginning again. It's compelling but the criticism still has merit especially in this text. Many of the interpretations aren't quite forced but they are clearly arising out of Heidegger - which is largely fine because he's a brilliant thinker.

Criticisms of the growing use of technology are peppered throughout the text. In our day and age of AI content being pushed, his view of technology is more and more compelling. Likewise is his observations about the wests misunderstanding of time and how we have less and less of it as we move on. That is more true than ever.

Heidegger has another book on truth, "Logic | The Questions of Truth," but that one is far more academic and "philosophical." "Parmenides" is itself a kind of poetizing and Heidegger goes to great lengths to defend this poetizing against the sterile philosophy offered by others. Some will appreciate more than others but the point is generally well taken. Far from an introduction of Heideggerian concepts, this text elucidates much and pushes it's attentive reader farther on the path to thinking - which is what Heidegger's first goal is.

[Edward Moran · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think the founders of the judeo-christian tradition had good intentions but according to heidegger this god commands while the Greek gods merely hint. When the Greeks were on their way to Troy they saw a lightning bolt from Zeus on their right. This hint from Zeus was a good sign or could it be concealing disaster. It is merely a hint and could both reveal and conceal. He also compares Rilke to Freud although he doesn't name the founder of psychoanalysis. Both of these see a continuum between man and animal. For them, "the open" is like sugar dissolved in water or a flower in air. In this way, animals are superior to men. Animals and ,therefore, the instinctual man is without bounds and limitless. Heidegger has a totally different of "the open." The open gives both unconcealment and concealment and exists for man only. "The open" is "Being" and beings. "Being" is not the opposite of beings and has no opposite. That is why it is so difficult for me to think "Being" and "the open." Man gives the open because unlike animals, he has "the word." Man is in the open when he says of a being "it is" and it suddenly comes into unconcealment. Addendum: I dreamt some girls dropped acid on me last night and I was seeing all kinds of psychedelic colors. It was sort of an unnerving dream and I don't think heidegger has no explanation for strange phenomena like hearing voices and " the unconscious," Freud and jung at least try to deal with such phenomena as hearing voices. Voices coming out of TVS,movies,etc...and the radio all are causes of the modern problem of mental illness. When you hear a voice out of a radio, this is like a mysterious voice coming from a god. Hearing voices not connected to human beings in the flesh is a form of insanity. Premonitions of all this are in Dracula and Frankenstein. Joseph Campbell talks of "no bounds" in his lectures in a positive way and this is like Freud. This is like the chatter of voices coming from the radio which the instinctual man hears as a disembodied voice or god. One has to try to start a dialogue with and relate to these "gods" if one is to keep from going insane.

[Straw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Considero o melhor livro pra se iniciar a leitura de Heidegger. Além de tudo, um clássico: o título é "Parmênides"; trinta páginas falando do poema de Parmênides, outras mais de duzentas investigando a significação de aletheia e estabelecendo as relações desta.