The Imperative to See the Whole (original) (raw)

Synopsis The Eleatic advance over Homeric epic was to bring the phenomenon of the finitude of existence into view in terms of logos and not just mythos. In seeing that being is bound to appearance not accidentally but in essence, Parmenides confronts limits of thought which were destined for modern resurgence in the wake of the demise of the epochal dominance of the Platonic understanding of the meaning of being. Despite this dominance, the phenomenon of radical finitude reappears in the philosophy of Leibniz, shaped in part by Europe's more or less sudden discovery of Chinese culture in the seventeenth century. The European debates concerning the nature of Chinese thought reveal a struggle in the Western imagination to come to terms with this discovery, a struggle radical enough in retrospect to warrant description as the “re-orientation of the occident.” This re-orientation led inexorably to Kant's epoch-inaugurating realization of the role of transcendental imagination in the constitution of temporality, which was a realignment of our understanding of our limitations no less radical than had been Parmenides'. Heidegger's phenomenology of human finitude recounts this same history instead as the series of three increasingly errant interpretations of the meaning of being - being as revealing/concealing in ancient Greece, being as creation in post-classical, pre-modern Christian Europe, and being as production under modernity. In order to enable a showing of this phenomenon of the historicity of the meaning of being "from out of itself," Heidegger undertakes his project of the "retrieval" and "destruction" of these three meanings which have unfolded throughout the history of philosophy. Beginning from our own modern understanding of being in terms of production, I retrace Heidegger's steps as he thinks his way backwards, first back into the pre-Modern understanding of being as creation, and then back a second time into the pre-Socratic experience of being as a dynamic balance (kosmos) of revealing and concealing of the contrast between production and creation in understanding the poesis we call seeing the whole (i.e. thinking about being). This path of retrieval is found to converge not upon a pure origin of the thinking of original being in Parmenides, as Heidegger seems to maintain, but rather to lead us to the thought of the operation of mixture in the core of metaphysics, and in particular, to the thought of the mixture of contrasts arising in the epochal intersection of Ancient Greek and Anglo-Saxon cultures, from which the modern Germanic languages, including German and English, have arisen. The significance of that original fold in the history of thought mirrors the significance of the folding underway for us today, as Western philosophy continues to come to terms with Eastern ways of thinking about being, and a cultural interaction is occurring whose significance for the future is destined to become as consequential one day as the meeting of the Classical and Anglo-Saxon worlds in first-century Britain is for our present today.