Martin Heidegger: Parmenides P 135 to 163

In pages 135 through 163 of Parmenides, Heidegger takes up his pursuit of the Fourth Directive presented by alethea. He begins by discussing the law of proximity, claiming that normal vision overlooks what is immediately closest and sees first what is the next closest. The brightness shining from alethea is overlooked as what is closest. Instead, one sees what the light illuminates before he recognizes the light. Hence, the beginning is first seen in what is begun. Heidegger points out that the first beginning is not the primordial beginning. The first beginning comes to light at the end. This end is a sign of the closeness of the primordial beginning. Thus, if the history of the West is the history of “the transformation of the essence of truth and Being,” then capturing the essence of Being indicates the end of this history. It is at such a completion that one comes to realize the resonant importance of Parmenides’ statement that “Being is;” that something is is more significant than what it is. 

Heidegger argues that a subject-object way of thinking, wherein unconcealedness is thought only as a showing that meets a perception, results in what is closest – the pure shining – being forgotten. The perceiver thinks that he is owning or mastering beings via the look, thus forgetting that he is being visited by Being. A full understanding of unconcealedness must include all of its components: its emergence from itself, its self-showing by such an emergence, and its coming to presence (or its “it is”). Addressing the argument that subjectivity can be overcome by eliminating the selfhood of man, Heidegger claims that this error in thinking ignores the distinction between selfhood, or individualism, and subjectivity. The selfhood of man occurs when man excludes himself from his relation to beings out of selfishness or egoism. When immersed in subjectivity, however, man asserts his will over other beings. The essence of subjectivity can include selfhood, but the two are not one and the same.