<i>To Gar Auto</i>: Heidegger on Identity in Parmenides B3

Abstract

The chapter studies the main stages in the evolution of Heidegger’s readings of Parmenides B3, constituting perhaps the philosophically most pregnant facet of Heidegger’s Parmenides interpretations. B3, perhaps the best-known fragment of Parmenides’ Poem, consists of a single line: to gar auto noein estin te kai einai, literally, 'for the same is thinking (noein) as well as being (einai)'. From the Neoplatonists Plotinus and Proclus up to the nineteenth century, this fragment was read as asserting, in some sense, the identity of thinking and being. With the general reaction against German idealism, scholars such as Eduard Zeller and John Burnet tried to rid the fragment of its alleged 'identity idealism' by reading it in the sense of 'what can be thought and what can be are the same', but this revised reading is not entirely persuasive. Whether or not we need to suspect Parmenides of 'idealism' depends entirely on the sense in which the sameness of identity (to auto) in B3 is understood. Throughout his career, from his very earliest lectures to his final 1973 seminar, Heidegger kept returning to the sense of this identity. He constantly insisted that to auto in B3 does not mean 'empty' identity in the sense of equivalence or homogeneity, but rather a reciprocal belonging-together and interdependence of thinking and being. In his later thought, Heidegger takes to auto as the subject of the fragment, equating it with Ereignis, the dynamic event or 'taking place' of meaningful presence that ties together both givenness and receptivity, being and thinking. In the final stage of his engagement with Parmenides, Heidegger emphasises that this was a philologically untenable imposition of his own 'postmetaphysical' thinking of Ereignis upon Parmenides’ 'protometaphysical' thinking of being as sheer meaningful presence/accessibility (Anwesen). Ultimately, Heidegger makes it clear that we need to distinguish between three different types of identity: (1) Parmenidean identity in which thinking (receptivity) is referred back to being (intelligible givenness); (2) modern, 'idealistic' identity in which being (as the object of thinking) is referred back to the cognitive activity of the thinking ego (as in Berkeley’s dictum esse est percipi); and (3) Heidegger’s own, postmetaphysical sense of identity in which both thinking and being are referred to a primal event of meaningful reciprocity.