CHAPTER 1

Primal Truth, Errant Tradition, and Crisis: The Pre-Socratics in Late Modernity

I

The thought on the Greeks in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger has been the inspiration for much original and penetrating philosophic scholarship in the twentieth century. Assuming that Heidegger is the foremost rethinker of Nietzsche’s legacy (an assumption that needs to be tested), Nietzsche’s writing and Heidegger’s teaching and writing began a movement that now includes numbers too great to count. Certainly not all who might be named are philosophically Nietzschean or Heideggerian; they are, however, variously indebted to the new questioning of the tradition. The readings by Nietzsche and Heidegger of the early philosophers have not usually been at the center of this reengagement with the Greeks, despite the fact that for these two thinkers the early philosophers and poets are the source of primordial wisdom from which the modern West must draw for self-renewal. But if one is to understand the roots of some leading recent approaches to the Greeks, including Plato and Aristotle, one must examine these readings. My aim is to consider in broad terms what these thinkers claim to find in the early philosophers and what philosophically motivates their quest. Due to limitations of space, I will not discuss the interpretations of particular ancient figures in detail, and I will also set aside all questions about the scholarly accuracy of their interpretations. To consider the turn to the early philosophers in these two great thinkers is to uncover something fundamental about their philosophies, and thus about philosophy in the most recent period of modernity. Some light will be shed as well, necessarily, on the nature of modernity itself.

II

Among the notes collected after Nietzsche’s death and published under the title The Will to Power, there is the following reflection on German philosophy, dated 1885 in the Musarion edition:

German philosophy as a whole—Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, to name the greatest—is the most fundamental form of romanticism and homesickness there has ever been: the longing for the best that has ever existed. One is no longer at home anywhere; at last one longs back for that place in which alone one can be at home: the Greek world! But it is precisely in that direction that all bridges are broken—except the rainbow-bridges of concepts!¹

Nietzsche surmises that perhaps in a few centuries the real dignity of German philosophy will be recognized for its “gradual reclamation of the soil of antiquity” and for its renewal of the bond with the Greeks, “the hitherto highest type of man.” He then concludes:

Today we are getting close to all those fundamental forms of world-interpretation devised by the Greek spirit through Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras—we are growing more Greek by the day; at first, as is only fair, in concepts and evaluations, as Hellenizing ghosts, as it were: but one day, let us hope, also in our bodies! Herein lies (and has always lain) my hope for the German character!²

Nietzsche here describes German philosophy as a rebellion against modernity, against the Reformation in particular, and as a second Renaissance of antiquity. The recovery Nietzsche seeks is ambiguous, however, for the Greeks are only “the hitherto highest type of man.” The hope he places in the German character, whereby he implies he seeks another bridge beyond merely conceptual bridges, is to renew Greekness in mind and body, and thus to rectify a flaw in antiquity, an injustice that antiquity inflicted on itself. This was the wound inflicted on Greek culture by Socrates and his new kind of philosophizing. “The real philosophers of Greece are those before Socrates (—with Socrates something changes).”³ The early tragic culture of the Greeks succumbed to that wound, but a renewed tragic culture, based on a consciousness of all that had happened since the Greeks, and on a deeper understanding of the sources of mind and body in will, might endure, as incorporating the wound. Nietzsche’s German predecessors did not follow this path, as Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer were all avowed admirers of Socrates, and Nietzsche’s Hellenism rejects the Hellenism of classical German culture. Yet as efforts to address the soul’s homesickness, all German philosophic striving is concerned with the problem of evil. He points to this feature in another note: “The significance of German philosophy (Hegel): to evolve a pantheism through which evil, error and suffering are not felt as arguments against divinity.”⁴ The note contains this sentence: “I myself have attempted an aesthetic justification: how is the ugliness of the world possible?”

The shared project of the German philosophers, including Nietzsche (and Heidegger, as I will argue) could be summed up this way: Burdened with homesickness in modernity, or a sense of loss, they diagnose the ground of that loss and thereby transform the loss, so that it (the illness, wound, or ugliness) is preserved somehow, or justified, in the transformation. And yet, as justified, it is not simply overcome. The renewal of antiquity includes somehow the gulf, the abyss, that separates modernity from antiquity. Nietzsche says that he is the first to justify existence through a critique of morality:⁵ “I saw no one who had ventured a critique of moral value feelings.”⁶ He shows that ugliness, evil, and pain are inseparable from beauty, nobility, and health. Herein he opposes the whole post-Socratic tradition, including Kant and Hegel, who in different ways attempt to “prove the dominion of morality by means of history.” But “we no longer believe in morality, as they did, and consequently we have no need to found a philosophy with the aim of justifying morality.”⁷ Still, there is a sense in which those modern justifications of morality are built upon the undermining of older notions of the nature and supports of morality, such that they opened up an abyss (or exploited an already existing abyss) in freedom, in order to force reason or spirit to discover (or create) a new order in that abyss. In modernity before Kant and Hegel, ideas of freedom with abysmal potentials (such as Rousseau disclosed) emerged, pointing to the need for a synthesis of the ancient and the modern. Nietzsche rejects the classical German Idealist syntheses, so that he does not start with the acceptance of freedom in its modern Enlightenment, democratic meaning, and he does not seek to reconcile it with post-Socratic rational morality. All the same, he offers another synthesis and another justification, in which the most extreme form of modern skepticism is one component and the turn to the early Greeks is another.

Nietzsche rejects the late antiquity of Socrates and Plato—thinkers who employed logic and dialectics as they “took up the cause of virtue and justice.”⁸ “Since Plato philosophy has been dominated by morality” owing to his portrayal of Socrates, “who was a monomaniac with regard to morality,” tyrannizing over the instincts and the senses with his logic, producing the formula “reason = virtue = happiness,” but thereby showing only that “the Socratic disposition is a phenomenon of decadence.”⁹ “Philosophers are prejudiced against appearance, change, pain, death, the corporeal, the senses, fate and bondage, the aimless.”¹⁰ Nietzsche seems to include the early Greeks, but Heraclitus does not wholly fit the charge.¹¹ With the Socratics, philosophy is put on the path of finding a rational moral teleology of the whole, the search for “morality-in-itself” and the “good-in-itself.” The ancient sophistic culture, whose predecessors were Heraclitus and Democritus and whose highest expression is Thucydides, was in accord with “the Greek instincts” in rejecting this quest. It was a “remarkable moment” verging on the first critique of morality.¹² At the core of Nietzsche’s appreciation of the Greeks is his revival of non-Socratic moral pessimism: the absence (in the early philosophers and poets) or the rejection (in the sophists and Thucydides) of rational moral teleology. Of course this does not mean that for Nietzsche these thinkers lacked either nobility or reason. To the true nobility and the higher reason he gives the name “Dionysian wisdom.”¹³

III

In one of his last writings, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche says of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, that it put forth two decisive innovations: the account of the Dionysian phenomenon as a root of Greek art, and the understanding of Socrates as “an instrument of Greek disintegration,” the figure who embodies “‘rationality’ at any price as a dangerous force that undermines life.”¹⁴ The Dionysian is “the ultimate, most joyous, most wantonly extravagant Yes to life,” based on the insight that “nothing in existence may be subtracted, nothing is dispensable.” To clarify this he quotes his own Twilight of the Idols: “Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems; the will to life rejoicing over its inexhaustibility even in the sacrifice of the very highest types—that is what I called Dionysian. Not in order to get rid of terror and pity . . . but in order to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity—that joy that includes even joy in destroying.”¹⁵ This points toward the “aesthetic justification” of existence: “I took the will to beauty, to persist in like forms, for a temporary means of preservation and recuperation: fundamentally, however, the eternally-creative appeared to me to be, as the eternal compulsion to destroy, associated with pain.”¹⁶ The will is realized not in created form itself (the Apollonian moment of art) but in the act of creating, for which form is but a vehicle. The creative will to life celebrated by the poets is its own telos. But in Nietzsche’s judgment Socrates and Plato as moral teleologists seek a world in which life will be possible without change, destruction, and pain, and so they necessarily oppose the poets. There exists no truly Dionysian philosopher among the Greeks. “Before me this transposition of the Dionysian into a philosophic pathos did not exist; tragic wisdom was lacking.”¹⁷ Among philosophers the thought of Heraclitus comes nearest to it: “The affirmation of passing away and destroying; saying Yes to opposition and war; becoming, along with the radical repudiation of the very concept of being.”¹⁸ The doctrine of eternal recurrence as taught by Zarathustra might have been taught already by Heraclitus, but surely in a different mode and for different ends.¹⁹ In a brief passage of The Birth of Tragedy, Heraclitus is described as the one philosopher having the aesthetic vision of the whole. Dionysian art “reveals to us the playful construction and destruction of the individual world as the overflow of a primordial delight. Thus the dark Heraclitus compares the world-building force to a playing child that places stones here and there and builds sand hills only to overthrow them again.”²⁰ Heraclitus transposes the Dionysian-poetic vision into philosophic concepts, but does so incompletely. One can surmise that Heraclitus lacks a concept of will to ground the cosmic activity of “world-building.” But no ancient thinker could have had that concept, nor the historical consciousness resulting from insight into the will’s powers of self-transformation.

Nietzsche remarks that he had to abandon hopes for the recovery of tragic culture by the Germans of his time through the inspiration of Wagner’s art, and that he “advanced further down the road of disintegration—where I found new sources of strength for individuals. We have to be destroyers!” In the state of general disintegration “individuals can perfect themselves as never before.”²¹ The decay of the old values has to be advanced, not held back, so that new values can replace them. Humanity is confronted with the greatest danger, the loss of all ability for higher willing with the collapse of the old values, but this danger affords rare higher human beings the opportunity to create new values and a new humanity. Such human beings do not yet exist: “I wish for a species of man that does not yet exist: for the ‘masters of the earth.’”²² That the human species has such power for willing a new species into being is a thought surely lacking in the Greeks. It has to be added that Nietzsche’s prophetic stance and his hopes for such transformation would not be possible without the examples of biblical revelation, which he in general opposes for their moral teachings. In paradoxical fashion, Dionysian wisdom combines affirmation of the world as it is—the rejection of any telos beyond the Now—with the hope of radical transformation of man. This apparent contradiction between affirming and transcending is present in the willing of the eternal recurrence, not as theoretical doctrine but as means for the will’s self-transformation. “To the paralyzing sense of general disintegration and incompleteness I opposed the eternal recurrence.”²³ I restate that Nietzsche synthesizes the most extreme form of modern skepticism with the recovery of early Greek wisdom, and that this constitutes in his view not a mere fusing of doctrines but the deepest understanding of the beneficence of evil.

I turn now to the incomplete and unpublished book written soon after The Birth of Tragedy, entitled Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Two primary concerns of this writing are the individuality of philosophers and the relation of philosophers to their culture. Nietzsche says he is less concerned with the truth of the systems of the philosophers than with their individuality, the “incontrovertible and non-debatable” foundation of their thought in their unique personalities. The inquiry has a higher than merely scholarly aim: to bring to light great human beings whom we must love and honor.²⁴ But of course we cannot love and honor something unless we can see what is lovable and honorable in it, and the question must be asked whether what is lovable and honorable in the philosophers does not have some relation to the truth or at least nobility of what they sought. Nietzsche speaks of their capacity for wonderment at mundane life, which appears to them as a problem worthy of contemplation. Philosophy is a human possibility that transcends these particular individuals. But Nietzsche himself wonders not only at their wonderment, he wonders also at the Greek culture that was able to produce these great individuals without envy, with admiration for their qualities. Why did Greece have philosophers at the high point of its political and artistic flourishing? Most cultures have no inherent need of philosophy, and the philosopher arises as a mere accident in them. The early Greeks attained somehow a harmony between philosophy and the general culture; this marvel is what Nietzsche puts before the culture of his time, in hopes that it will be emulated. But there is a difficulty in this. Philosophy alone can never initiate a healthy culture, it can only be in accord with an already healthy culture by warding off dangers to its health. In this way early Greek philosophy was in accord with the tragic poetic culture.²⁵ But this unique harmony must be rooted in something that is uniquely Greek and that neither philosophy nor poetry could create. The theme of the individuality of the early philosophers, who establish various archetypes of philosophy, is mirrored in the individuality of Greek culture as a whole. How can radically unique beings serve as archetypes for others, when even they themselves do not grasp the conditions of their existence? This is a basic problem lurking in this essay.

In any case the great age does not last. The great age is one of the highest reverence for individuals that are whole and complete, which is possible at the early stage of a culture before traditions appear that limit and stifle the powers of individuals. The greatness of the early thought is related to its being the first efforts at philosophic discovery such that each discoverer finds his own way and that way reflects his being and that of no one else. Hence the early thinkers are pure types, and the pure types include Socrates.²⁶ Interestingly, Nietzsche did not complete the treatise, which ends with Anaxagoras, and Socrates is mentioned only in passing. Starting with Plato, philosophers are mixed types, which means that they rely on traditions of thought from which they select their own approaches, but also that they mix being philosophers with being founders of schools and sects. They are concerned with creating institutions to preserve and protect their activity, a sign that they are not in accord with their world. Philosophers become exiles, conspiring against their fatherlands. The homelessness of philosophy emerges at the very moment when philosophers become preoccupied with the ethical and political. Philosophers begin to seek laws that are different from the customs of their cities. Nietzsche does not mean that the early philosophers are popular thinkers, content to articulate prevailing customs and myths. On the contrary, they are solitary and proud, indifferent to public opinion and oracular in their speech. But admiration for this proud indifference was itself a trait of the culture. To refer to The Birth of Tragedy, one might say the early culture was not yet rationally moral and followed an instinct-based custom that revered the great individual.

This bears directly on the relation of philosophy to tragic poetry. It is true that the early philosophers leave mythical thought behind, and they think in concepts rather than images.²⁷ But they are not simply empirical students of nature and not solely logical in their thinking. They seek the ground and the unity of the whole, which are hidden from ordinary experiences. Extraordinary leaps of intuition are required to make their bold proposals about the ground and unity. This intuition brings them into relation to poetic intuitions about being, and also to the questions that the tragic poets raise about the value of existence, that is, whether individual beings have any right to be at all.²⁸ Tragic culture, as a whole, shares the belief that greatness exists in individuals, not the species, and is therefore fragile and transient, considered in light of the overpowering whole, which is indifferent to human wishes and human justice. Anaximander’s vision is simply pessimistic, but Nietzsche claims that Heraclitus finds a way to affirm the transience. He rejects Anaximander’s dualism of a fallen world of individual beings that need punishment for the injustice of simply existing, and of a ground into which they rightly return, by affirming the innocent play of becoming, of creation and destruction, as a contemplated spectacle.²⁹ Heraclitus is again closely related to the wisdom of the poets, in that he views the world as a work of art and identifies with the artist-god that produces it. As such he is both contemplator and actor, just as “the artist stands contemplatively above and at the same time actively within his work.” It might be suggested that Nietzsche here points to a poetic mode of philosophizing that would resolve the problem of individuality and universal archetype. Individuality achieves a kind of universality not through knowledge of timeless essences but through a poetic producing that participates in the creative force behind the whole itself. Heraclitus prefigures Nietzsche’s central thought, the justification of existence for and by the great individual through the doctrine of the will to power.

IV

Heidegger’s intense engagement with the early Greeks comes after Being and Time (1927), in which work, as well as in his studies before 1927 as a whole, they play a minor role. Certainly Aristotle is from the start central to his phenomenological and ontological inquiry, and to a lesser extent Plato. Let us remind ourselves that in Being and Time Heidegger seeks to recover the meaning of the question of Being, which he claims has been forgotten.³⁰ The phenomenological analysis of the average and everyday understanding of Being presupposed by human existence, or by the human way of being in the world, is only a preparation for recovering the question. The human has a special place among the beings in having a unique openness to Being, such that the capacity for questioning about Being belongs to its constitution. As such the human way of existing is the site or place for the disclosure of Being, and can be called Da-Sein, the “there (or here) of Being.” Heidegger insists his analysis is concerned not with anthropology but with ontology, and its aim is to show not how the human is there in Being, but how Being is there through the human. He also insists that Being is not a concept, genus, or causal ground but the primordial disclosure of the world, which makes accessible any thinking about beings, including any thinking with and about concepts, genera, and causality. But although Being is the ground of disclosure for any engagement with beings, Being (das Sein) itself tends to be concealed, as human attention is focused on the being (das Seiende). That which is nearest and most pervasive, Being, is also what is most hidden.

The philosophic and scientific traditions have mostly overlooked Being and promoted its hiddenness, and thus the loosening and dismantling of layers of tradition about Being must be undertaken, the so-called Destruktion of tradition. This is not merely a negative undertaking since in a hidden way Being sustains the Western philosophic tradition, and the Destruktion will reveal how Being is present even in its absence from explicit reflection. As early as Parmenides, the Greeks already display a tendency to think of Being in terms of worldly entities and to favor entities that are most present at hand, or enduringly present, in their accounts of Being or the world. Greek thinking has a twofold prejudice: With respect to time, it favors the present among the temporal ecstases, and with respect to logos, it favors assertoric judgments and the logical relations among such judgments. The full scope and power of time and logos for the unconcealment of Being, for primordial truth (aletheia), was not noticed or developed by the Greeks. The historical inquiry shows how these prejudices unfold from a Greek beginning, which has still some appreciation of Being as disclosure or aletheia, into more extreme Being–forgetful forms in the modern subject-object distinction and the mathematical-technical approach to beings. Everywhere in the modern world, beings are the object of calculation and manipulation, and the ground of their disclosure is walled off from awareness. This entails that the human is lost to itself, unaware of its own essence.

It is well known that Heidegger did not complete the planned parts of Being and Time, and although his fundamental pursuit remained the same, namely, the recovery of the question of Being, his path toward it changed. This change is related to several obvious external features in Heidegger’s later thought: the absence of the formal systematic approach of Being and Time, the new emphasis on certain figures (the early Greeks, Nietzsche, Hölderlin), on the themes of poetry, language, and the gods, and also on nihilism and the technological world night. In all of these changes, Heidegger seeks a deeper account of the ground of the disclosure of Being and does so by turning to the history of Being, by which is meant not a historical account of Being, but Being itself as giving or sending a fate or destining (Geschick)—a way of disclosure that makes a claim on the human and to which the human must respond. In a relation of mutual dependence, Being appropriates the human, and the human in turn avows its belonging to Being. Being needs the human as the site of its disclosure, such that the human is the guardian and protector of Being, and conversely the human cannot be human without the relation to Being, which gives shelter to the human essence. The most developed account of this historical appropriation (Ereignis) by and of Being is found in the recently published Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning of 1936–38.³¹ This cannot be my theme directly, although Heidegger’s turn to the early Greeks is inseparable from these considerations, and I will necessarily refer to them without the full elaboration they require.

In the history of Being two moments are most decisive: the original opening to Being among the Greeks at the beginning (Anfang), in the first questioning about Being, which founds a destiny that carries forward Western history, and the present moment, that of oblivion to the question of Being, or nihilism, which completes the process of forgetting. Nietzsche’s thought both fulfills and is a witness to the completion of Western metaphysics in nihilism, and understanding him is essential for pointing beyond the present oblivion to another beginning, a renewal of the opening to Being that also requires the most intense thinking about the first beginning. Heidegger offers some autobiographical illumination on how he reached this account. Writing soon after the end of the Second World War on his Rectoral Address of 1933, Heidegger notes that in 1932 he found in Ernst Jünger’s book The Worker “an essential understanding of Nietzsche’s metaphysics, insofar as in the horizon of this metaphysics the history and the present of the West is seen and foreseen.”³² Jünger exposed “the universal mastery of the will to power within the planetary scope of history.” Heidegger then grasped that what Nietzsche meant by the “death of God” was that this actuality of the will to power follows the collapse of the “effective power in history of the supersensible world, especially the world of the Christian God.” Thereupon he saw the need for “a reflection on the overcoming of the metaphysics of the will to power and a dialogue with the Western tradition from its beginning.”³³ In this concise account, without evident irony, Heidegger claims that his rallying the university to support the National Socialist regime was for the sake of overcoming the very doctrine, the will to power, that the new regime, usurping Nietzsche’s authority, used as a slogan.

Indeed, the Rectoral Address itself contains Heidegger’s first published statement on the need for the return to the beginnings within the outlines of the history of Being, as a historical new beginning. He gave seminars entitled The Beginning of Western Philosophy (Anaximander and Parmenides) in summer 1932, and on Plato’s allegory of the cave and Theaetetus in winter 1931–32, that initiate this return. In the address he calls the German people to place themselves “under the power of the beginning of our spiritual-historical existence.” He claims that in spite of our great remove from the beginning, “the beginning is itself in no way overcome or indeed annihilated. . . . The beginning is still. It lies not behind us as the long since departed, but it stands before us. . . . The beginning has entered our future, and stands there as the distant command, bidding us to retrieve its greatness.”³⁴ Only by winning back the greatness of the beginning can “science [Wissenschaft] become the inner necessity of our existence.” With a reference to Nietzsche’s “death of God” Heidegger seals the case that modern man’s “lostness among the beings” makes necessary the turn to the beginning. Surely at the time of this address Heidegger was hopeful about the capacity of the new regime to assist in this remarkable metaphysical undertaking, though his hopes were soon dashed. It is notable that there is some parallel to the hopes placed in Wagner by the youthful Nietzsche, which also vanished with more experience. And in each case one has the notion, coming after the disenchantment, that a further advance into the night of nihilism is necessary for the arrival of the new dawn. In the hopeful time of summer 1933 Heidegger restates the claim about the enduring beginning that awaits our response to its challenge, using language that has a central place in his thought thereafter: “The essence of the beginning turns itself about [kehrt sich um]; it is no longer the great anticipatory origin, but the incomplete, probing beginning of the future development.”³⁵ The first beginning in the Greeks points us toward a second beginning, and not merely is this pointing a human event, but it occurs within the beginning itself, in its turning about. The turning all the same calls for human response in order to be fulfilled. This is one of many indications that the Kehre, the much-debated turning of the later Heidegger’s thought, is not just a change or turning in Heidegger’s way of thinking.

Although sometime after 1934 Heidegger abandons expectations or hopes of a politically led renewal of the beginnings and calls instead for reflective listening for and awaiting an arrival prepared by our thinking, there is a sense in which his conception remains more hopeful than the mature Nietzsche’s. In Nietzsche one finds no claim that the great beginning continues to govern covertly the unfolding of history and no parallel to statements like this one of Heidegger: “The primordial disclosure of Being as a whole, the question concerning beings as such, and the beginning of Western history are the same.”³⁶ Nietzsche exhorts the philosophers of the future to assume extraordinary responsibility, but he admits it is a role that is not prepared by earlier philosophy. Nietzsche through his account of Socrates and Plato shows that philosophy can have dire consequences but not that it has ever alone founded a great culture, much less that it has been the hidden governing force of all Western history, which brings itself and the human toward a second beginning. As his short book on the early philosophers shows, the harmony of those philosophers with their culture (which Nietzsche, one may say, is overstating) was a brief moment in the otherwise precarious relation of philosophic individuals to their culture. The prominence of the philosophic life as a theme in Nietzsche relates to his stress on Socrates, to whom Nietzsche is the profoundly kindred antipode, whereas Heidegger’s near total silence on Socrates reflects his neglect of that theme. One could say that Nietzsche’s justification of existence for and by great individuals is replaced by Heidegger’s justification of the human essence as the erring-revealing site of the truth of Being, a justification for and by Being.

Clearly there is some kinship between Nietzsche’s attack on the moral-teleological thinking of the Socratics and Heidegger’s account of the Platonic stage of the forgetting of Being. For both Nietzsche and Heidegger, the attempt to ground human ethics and justice in the whole obscures the truth about the whole; hence their justifications of existence are supra-ethical. Heidegger in the early 1930s³⁷ seeks to uncover the manner in which Plato ambiguously retains a relation to primordial aletheia while he also obscures it. In Plato “the coming into presence [Anwesung] is no longer, as in the beginning of Western thinking, the emerging of the hidden into unconcealment,” since Plato conceives coming into presence as idea. The idea is not merely “the foreground of unconcealment [aletheia] but is rather the ground of its possibility.”³⁸ Subordinated to the idea, “truth is no longer the fundamental feature of Being itself but becomes correctness, henceforth the decisive mark of the knowing of beings.” Through the highest of ideas, the Good, the ground of the existing and appearing of all beings, Plato makes the human and its place among the beings the dominant concern of metaphysics.³⁹ Yet this turning to humanism is not merely a human event. “Plato’s thinking follows a turning in the essence of truth itself [Wandel des Wesens der Wahrheit], which turning becomes a turning in the history of metaphysics that in Nietzsche’s thinking has begun its unconditioned completion.”⁴⁰ Nietzsche’s thought is the completion of Platonic metaphysics, not its overcoming, since his conception of philosophy as the highest will to power takes the elevation of the human (albeit supra-ethical) to its most extreme point.⁴¹ Even so, Heidegger also writes that the demand for reflection on the Greek beginnings would be “arbitrary and presumptuous” without two figures, Hölderlin and Nietzsche, “who knew the beginnings more primordially than all ages before them, and only for the reason that they experienced for the first time the end of the West, and furthermore: even in their existence and work they became ends.” This was possible for them only because “they were overpowered by the beginning and were elevated to greatness. Both these moments, reflection on the first beginning and founding an end that is fitting to it and its greatness, belong together in the turning [Kehre].”⁴² In seeing the end, seeing the beginning in the light of the end, and seeking a new beginning, Nietzsche was unfolding a fate he did not recognize, one leading beyond his self-conception as well as his interpretation of the beginnings. All the same his errors were not mere failures but the inevitable limitations of thinking greatly in the grip of the higher power of Being.

V

In this final section on Heidegger, I want to consider further the way in which experience of the end in the time of the completion of metaphysics is crucial to recovery of the beginning and preparing for another beginning. Heidegger should not be understood as claiming that the beginning was the primordial disclosure of Being whose brilliance is required to illuminate the darkness of modern nihilism. In that case, the beginning would simply belong to the past, as something lost and now to be regained. Rather the beginning is self-concealing essentially and from the start, and its power in the unfolding in Western history lies precisely in self-concealment. Hence the darkness of the forgetting of Being is a darkness belonging to the beginning itself and unfolding as the concealment of Being in Western history. In this way the age of the technological world night can offer an unprecedented illumination of the difference between Being and beings, for those who are able to think profoundly and primordially. Accordingly, in such thinking the Greek beginning receives an illumination that was unavailable to the early thinkers. One could say Heidegger offers a justification of erring as the forgetting of Being that recalls Nietzsche’s statement about the significance of German philosophy as the justification of evil, error, and suffering. No predecessor of Heidegger, however, spoke in terms of the truth of Being as the emerging of the hidden into unconcealment. Heidegger restates in such terms the Nietzschean claim that the darkness of nihilism is inherently full of promise. Heidegger often quotes the lines of Hölderlin, “But where danger is, grows / The saving power also.”⁴³ The uncovering of the saving power requires a dual movement of thought, back to the first beginning (which is also the movement of the beginning toward the present) and forward to the other beginning.

Heidegger provides a rich and fascinating account of this structure of thinking in his essay “The Saying of Anaximander,” written in 1946.⁴⁴ Heidegger dismisses the prevailing understanding of the early Greeks as the precursors of Plato and Aristotle, as rudimentary students of phusei onta groping toward the Aristotelian Physics, that has dominated since Theophrastus. Nietzsche himself employs superficial traditional categories of Being and Becoming in his readings.⁴⁵ The categories modern scholars use in describing the fragment of Anaximander, such as physical, ethical, rational, and philosophical, are absurd, since physics, ethics, rationalism and philosophy did not yet exist.⁴⁶ Our disciplinary boundaries and categories must be set aside. We have the problem of interpreting an utterance that is separated from us by an immense gulf, and of transposing our thinking in a modern language into the ancient Greek. Can we make the earliest saying speak to us?⁴⁷ Concealed in the chronological remoteness there may be a “historical proximity to the unspoken, an unspoken which will speak out in that which is coming.”⁴⁸ Perhaps the modern West is journeying into the earth’s evening, into an Abendland that transcends the European, which may be the place of another dawn. The once (Einst) of the first dawn may overtake the once of the latest dawn (the eschaton), in the departure of the long-concealed destiny of Being. “As destining, Being is inherently eschatological.”⁴⁹ If we think out of the eschatology of Being, and ponder the beginning that is approaching, we may be drawn to listen and to have dialogue with the early Greeks. In that dialogue, we can speak of the same Being, though it will be addressed from out of the different.⁵⁰ Our success will not be measured in terms of accuracy in the portrayal of “what was really present in the past.” The question is whether in the dialogue “that which wishes to come to language . . . comes of its own accord.” Being is, in different ways, destined to concern both the Greeks and us. But a fundamental trait of Being is to be more concealed than revealed, at all times. “By revealing itself in the being [das Seiende], Being [das Sein] withdraws.”⁵¹

Being as withdrawing endows beings with errancy, such that beings necessarily misinterpret the essential. This realm of misinterpretation is history. Errancy is not a human failing, since the self-misunderstanding of humans corresponds to the self-concealing of the illumination (Lichtung) of Being. Without errancy the human would have no relation to its destiny. Chronological distance from the Greeks is one thing, but historical distance is something else, and in that regard we are near to them. We are close to Being’s primordial refusal, to Being’s keeping its truth to itself even as it discloses beings. Being’s keeping to itself is the epochê of Being, which sense of epochê Heidegger distinguishes from Husserl’s methodical setting aside of thetic consciousness. Being’s epochê or holding back of its truth is the grounding of worlds, which are the epochs of errancy. This now for Heidegger is the more fundamental meaning of time: “The epochal essence of Being belongs to the concealed temporal character of Being,” in which the ecstatic time of Dasein is grounded. Indeed, the epochal essence appropriates (ereignet) the ecstatic essence of Dasein.⁵² Already at the dawn of thinking about Being, the essence of Being as the presencing of beings keeps to itself, and so the difference between Being and the beings themselves, the things that are present, remains concealed. The two are disclosed, the one as ground and the other as grounded, yet the ground comes forward as the highest being, so the difference is extinguished. “The destining of Being begins with the oblivion of Being,” although the earliest thought in an unspoken way shows the trace (Spur) of the difference, more than does later thought. (Heidegger points above all to the double sense of the genitive in Anaximander’s phrase kata to chreon.) The difference appears although not named as such.⁵³ Again, the oblivion is not a deficiency (Mangel); it is the event or appropriation (Ereignis) of metaphysics, the richest and broadest event in world history. We still stand in the shadow of this event, of this destining, and thus are granted the possibility of being mindful of Being’s destining.⁵⁴ Later accounts of Being in terms of idea, energeia, substantia, and objectivity may deepen the oblivion, but they do not thereby annul the destiny. On the contrary they fulfill it by pointing to the need for reflection on the destiny itself. In that reflection the human becomes the guardian of Being’s concealing itself, of its holding back its truth so that errant humans can be historical. The human realizes then the gift of Being that happens in errancy itself. Reflecting on the saving power in danger, thinking becomes questioning, which is the piety of thought.⁵⁵

VI

What cannot be ignored in these late modern readings of the early Greeks? What is compelling about them? I shall raise only a few considerations to be pursued in further reflection. First, the importance of thinking about the history of philosophy itself is made evident in them. Philosophizing addresses certain subjects, but it cannot consist only in addressing them directly, through our own thought and experience. It must include addressing questions to the philosophers themselves, to deepen the grasp of what philosophy itself is; otherwise proceeding on our own will be naïve and narrow. At the heart of philosophy is reflection on the relation of the whole of Being to the ordinary things of experience, a relation that remains elusive and never wholly determined. By simply reflecting, as careful phenomenologists, on our own experiences, we will not come upon all the ways that the relation might be conceived. In sum, entering into the debate about the fundamental relation, the heart of philosophy, seems to depend in a crucial way on the existence of a tradition of thinking. Yet, of course, there were the first philosophers.

This brings me to the second item. Nietzsche and Heidegger remind us that philosophy cannot evade the fundamental questions about the ground and the unity of Being and that the early philosophers may offer deep insight into these questions. What is more, they remind us that traditions have a tendency to conceal their origins, and thus they raise the possibility that the beginning of the tradition may possess thoughts that deserve to stand on their own, and should not be considered only as a “first sailing.” The Platonic-Aristotelian account of them as “first sailing” is already placing the first thinkers in a light that is alien to them. On the other hand, Nietzsche and Heidegger note that it is impossible to forget that the early thinkers did begin a tradition, one developing thoughts and concerns not in their sights, such that certain possibilities latent in the early thought may be hidden from or barely grasped by its authors. In this regard the later tradition may in fact provide new disclosures about the beginning.

This brings up the third item. Both thinkers draw attention to tradition itself, as a ground and condition of thinking, and as having positive and negative import for thinking. They are moved to focus on this theme because in their time the very existence of the tradition of philosophy has become problematic. The crisis in the tradition brings attention to its singularity and fragility. Philosophy as directed toward the whole and the universal is still, qua tradition, something singular, having a unique temporal reality. It is mysterious that this activity, philosophy, has a singular beginning in certain times and places and that it unfolds where, when, and how it does, as a tradition. It is also astounding to consider that this tradition might wholly disappear from the earth at some time. Nietzsche and Heidegger think that these mysteries cannot be separated from the wonder of philosophy itself. Heidegger claims that this singularity is the gift and the destiny of the questioning of Being, the gift and destiny that affords dignity to human existence, so that when all other grounds of worth have fallen into nothingness, this alone stands out more purely than ever, as providing human beings with a mission.⁵⁶ One may question whether these two thinkers have gained genuine insights into fate and history, and also question whether they have appropriate estimations of the end and dignity of human life. Yet when all this has been properly regarded as questionable, something quite appropriate and essential for philosophy has been gained: some questions worthy of being asked.