Towards a Genealogy of the Metaphysics of Sight: Seeing, Hearing, and Thinking in Heraclitus and Parmenides

All material supplied via JYX is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, and duplication or sale of all or part of any of the repository collections is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for your research use or educational purposes in electronic or print form. You must obtain permission for any other use. Electronic or print copies may not be offered, whether for sale or otherwise to anyone who is not an authorised user. Towards a Genealogy of the Metaphysics of Sight: Seeing, Hearing, and Thinking in Heraclitus and Parmenides Backman, Jussi

Platonic thought; we will use the Heideggerian readings as a guideline and source of inspiration without concurring with all of their interpretive theses. 6 On this basis, we can proceed to investigate the extent to which this account applies to the pre-Platonic texts, particularly to the fragments of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Is there a primacy of vision and the visual, or of any of the other senses, before Plato? What is the relationship between thinking and the senses in pre-Platonic philosophy?
Considering these questions will enable us to trace the initial context and function of the visualization of thinking and to thus draft a provisional genealogy of ocular metaphysics.

In an Ideal Light: Heidegger and the Platonic Metaphysics of Sight
One of the first modern thinkers to explicitly regard Greek philosophy as a "metaphysics of sight"-and to attack it for precisely that reason-was Martin Luther, whose largely implicit but decisive influence on the young Heidegger has been studied by John van Buren and other scholars. 7 In his quest to release Christian theology from the yoke of Aristotelian scholasticism, accompanied by his wellknown diatribes against "the blind pagan master" Aristotle,8 Luther contrasted the metaphysical concentration on immediate "visibility," in the sense of intelligible presence to immediate intuitive apprehension, with the Pauline emphasis that the 6 One particularly problematic facet of Heidegger's readings of Heraclitus and Parmenides, and one that we will not discuss here, is his notion of φύσις, in the sense of "appearing" and "emerging into presence," as their basic word, even though the term is very sparsely attested in either thinker. Martin glory" that considers the "invisible things" of the revelation to be intelligible and manifest in the inherent qualities of actual things and works, and the "theology of the cross," which regards even visible things in terms of faith in "the cross," i.e., in the transcendent activity of divine grace. 12 In the post-Hegelian era, the Lutheran critique of Greek metaphysics was  (Stuttgart, 1993). 10 In a sermon at Merseburg on August 6, 1545; Martin Luther, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 51 (Weimar, 1914), p. 11. See R. Konersmann, C. Wilson, and A. von der Lühe, "Sehen," in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer, 9 (Darmstadt, 1995) Making the totality of givenness [Gesamtgegebenheit] visible and evident is the manner and motif of the Greek way of thought; its historicity consists in this adjudication of self-consciousness that liberates ocularity [Okularität] and grants it independence in order to thus acquire an organ for mastering givenness. 13 Yorck argues that the very foundations of Platonic and Aristotelian thought-the category of "substance" (οὐσία), the notion of theoretical contemplation as the supreme aim of human activity, as well as the Platonic Idea as such-are rooted in a "liberation of ocularity from all other sensuality" and in the notion of beholding (Schauung) as the fundamental intellectual activity. 14  This notion is an aspect of Heidegger's more general claim that the tradition has understood being in terms of the model of constant presence (beständige Anwesenheit) which posits as a standard of being that which most constantly shows itself to pure apprehending or encountering-as-present (Gegenwärtigen). 22 In this account, the Western metaphysics of sight is rooted in a metaphysics of presence. As Heidegger explains in his 1940 lecture course on European Nihilism, the classical Greeks were a "visual" people, a people "of the eye" (Augenmenschen), not by virtue of some contingent psychological or cultural peculiarity but because of their fundamental metaphysical outlook for which the fundamental criterion of "to be" was presence, in the sense of accessibility to immediate apprehending: Greeks did not explain relations with beings through seeing because they were "visual people" [Augenmenschen]; they were "visual people," so to speak, because they experienced the being of beings as presence and constancy. 23 Seeing is the paradigmatic metaphysical sense because it is affords a particular kind of access to beings as present. What is it that distinguishes visual access from that provided by the other senses? Vision is not the most immediate form of sensory access; as Aristotle emphasizes in De anima, vision precisely requires distance, a transparent medium of visibility between the visual organ and the visual object. 24 Touch is more immediate in the sense that there is no spatial gap and no clearly defined limit between that which touches and that which is touched. Somewhat problematically, Aristotle takes the bodily flesh itself to be the medium of touching, conjecturing that the actual organ of the tactile sense must be something internal to the body 25 , but in Metaphysics 9.10, describing the simple intuitive apprehending of non-discursive truths as the most immediate form of access, he takes recourse 23  precisely to a tactile metaphor (θιγεῖν or θιγγάνειν 'to touch upon'). 26 Hearing, on the other hand, is the proper vehicle of learning and understanding; 27 as the linguistic sense, it gives us access not only to particular sounds but also to universal λόγος in the form of general discourses, concepts, rules, and narratives. What, for Plato, distinguishes vision from the other senses is its "sharpness" (ὀξύτης), 28 i.e., its determinacy: vision gives us a privileged kind of access to the limits of things, their colors, contours, and shapes, and thus discloses them as distinct, definite, and delimited. As Heidegger puts it: The ancients considered that things are given most completely in seeing, namely in their immediate presentness [Gegenwart], indeed in such a way that the present being has the character which, for the Greeks, belongs to every being: πέρας, i.e., it is limited [begrenzt] by its firmly circumscribed look [Aussehen], its figure [Gestalt]. 29 Aristotle accordingly notes that vision is the source of a great number of distinctions (διαφοραί): 30 our visual field is more clearly and intricately differentiated than our auditory or tactile fields. Unlike touching, seeing also makes a clear distinction between that which senses and that which is sensed. Vision is the "objectifying" sense par excellence since, as Heidegger puts it, it discloses what is seen as "over against" or "opposite" (gegenüber) the one who sees-as something separate, at a distance.
As the path of access to things as distinct, definite, and separate, vision is the sensory paradigm of the Platonic Idea in the sense of the determinate and distinct 26 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1051b22-25. 27 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 980b21-25. 28  As the whatness that makes a being visible as the specific and distinct being that it is, the ἰδέα provides the delimiting outline of the being, the limit that identifies this being as what it is and differentiates it from what it is not. However, in the Platonic approach, this differentiating identity is at the same time essentially discursive and conceptual. As Socrates puts it in Book 6 of the Republic, even though beauty is spoken of in the plural in the sense that we attribute it to many numerically different things, the "what it is" (ὃ ἔστιν) thus predicated-the beautiful itself-is in each case one and the same. The many beautiful things can be seen with the eyes (ὁρᾶσθαι); beauty as such can only be intuitively grasped (νοεῖσθαι). 32 The "what it is" is what lets every particular thing be seen as a distinct and particular kind of thing, but in order to do this, it must be a specific kind, a generic conceptual identity named by a single predicate. 33 In order to become noetic vision, sensory vision must therefore be penetrated by the generality of conceptual discourse, which properly belongs to the realm of hearing; by itself, the visual sense is incapable of discovering the conceptual articulation underlying visual articulation. Socrates tells us in the Phaedo that it was this very discovery that discouraged him from pursuing the purely empirical study of nature: for fear that his soul might be "blinded" by the attempt to grasp things solely through the eyes and the other senses, he decided to continue his investigation into the truth of beings (τῶν ὄντων τὴν ἀλήθειαν) by means of conceptual discourse (ἐν λόγοις). 34 As Charles Kahn notes, "[t]he fundamental conception of the [Platonic] Forms is, from the beginning, linguistic rather than visual in its orientation [. . .].
[T]his conception is dominated not by the metaphor of seeing [. . .] but rather by the notion of essential Being as specified by the what-is-X? question." 35 Nonetheless, it would be hasty to conclude from this, with Kahn, that "[i]t is a mistake [. . .] to suppose [. . .] that the etymological connections of the terms idea and eidos with the verb idein, 'to see,' are in any way essential or decisive for Plato's conception of the Forms." 36 Rather, the Platonic approach presupposes that vision, the access to beings as delimited and articulate, is discursively and conceptually structured. Seeing takes place through a conceptual framework and is thus permeated by hearing; vision and λόγος are inextricably intertwined. In Kant's words, "thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." 37 A fundamental reason for the generic nature of the Idea can be found in the way in which Plato often describes conceptual identities as functional identities, as particular functions or purposes in terms of which beings are ultimately identified as belonging to a particular kind of beings. These functions can obviously be fulfilled by 33 Plato, Republic, 596a6-7. 34 Plato, Phaedo, in Platonis opera, ed. John Burnet, 1 (Oxford, 1900), 99e2-100a2. 35  several numerically distinct particular things. 38 The type of looking involved in the ἰδέα or εἶδος as a "look" is thereby linked to a very specific context-that of production, ποίησις. The ἰδέα becomes the normative model, the paradigmatic example to which the craftsman looks for guidance in the process of implementing a specific kind of utensil in a particular material, and this looking is, of course, not a sensory one, but rather a "looking away" (ἀποβλέπειν) from the material at hand The attribute constant in Heidegger's reading of the Greek understanding of being as constant presence must therefore be emphasized. Constancy requires a degree of determinacy; sensory visual access to the material world of continuous change must be complemented by a noetic "looking away" towards the ideally permanent (functional) identity in terms of which a being can be identified in its "what it is." In 38 See, e.g., Plato, Cratylus, in Platonis opera, 1, 389a5-390d6; Republic, 596a5-602b10. 39  the Republic, Socrates shows that it is precisely the specific mediated character of vision that makes it the paradigmatic sense, structurally analogous to the intuitive intellect. 41 In order to function, seeing, unlike the other senses, requires the presence of a third factor in addition to the eye and the object of sight: light, which, as Aristotle formulates it, is the actuality of the transparent medium of visibility as transparent. 42 In an analogous manner, noetic insight into the ideal identities of things is possible only in terms of a third factor: the Idea of the Good (τὸ ἀγαθόν), that is, ideality as such. Just as the sun is the source of visibility, the Idea of ideality, that is, the inherent teleological structure through which beings are disclosed in terms of their purpose-of an ontological ideal of goodness in the sense of appropriateness or aptness-is the source of intelligibility that makes individual Ideas, individual purposes, intelligible. The sun is thus to be regarded as an offspring (ἔκγονος) and counterpart (ἀνάλογον) of the Good. Just as the Good stands to the intellect (νοῦς) and its objects (τὰ νοούμενα) in the purely intelligible sphere of intellectual vision (νοητός), the sun stands to sensory vision (ὄψις) and its objects However, the sensuous and the intelligible are not simply two separate realms; rather, they are two intertwining components, two possible poles of orientation, of discursive vision. A central purpose of the Platonic analogy between the sun and the Idea of the Good is to liken discursive vision primarily oriented to the sensible to seeing in the dark: due to the absence of sufficient (intelligible or sensible) light, both are deficient modes of vision that fail to grasp the true determinate identity of what is seen and capture only perspectives or impressions (δόξαι). 45 Seeing correctly (ὀρθῶς), i.e., directing one's vision to that which is more (constant; μᾶλλον ὄν) 46 , presupposes that that which sees and that which is seen are connected under the "yoke" (ζυγόν) of proper illumination. 47 The Platonic metaphysics of sight is thus a metaphysics of light, more precisely, a "solar" metaphysics of the ideal source of light-an "ontotheological" approach in the Heideggerian sense that all vision, all access to the presence of beings, is constantly referred back to a supreme and ideal "source" or "cause":

Hearkening to the Voiceless Voice: Heraclitus's Protometaphysics of Hearing
In the light of Heidegger's account of the profound complicity between the Platonic notion of Ideas and the paradigmatic status of vision, it is not surprising that traces of a metaphysics of sight are hard to find in pre-Platonic philosophy. Andrea Wilson Nightingale has shown that "in the pre-Platonic thinkers, there is little if any evidence that knowledge takes the form of 'seeing' truth. [. . .] The emphasis is on discourse and hearing rather than spectating or seeing." 49 A "physics" of sight did exist very early on; Empedocles and Democritus were among the first philosophers to develop optical and physiological accounts of the phenomenon of vision, described in detail in Theophrastus's De sensibus. 50 However, the use of optical metaphors in philosophical terminology was scarce, and there is no sign of any particular ontological primacy of seeing as a privileged mode of access to beings. As the onomatopoetic term indicates, the foreign speech of "barbarians" was regarded by the Greeks as inarticulate and garbled, and one can suppose that "barbaric souls" are "irrational" (ἄλογος) precisely in their inability to grasp the fundamental articulation of things in accordance with λόγος, the basic discursive structure of intelligibility. This lack of discursive and conceptual articulation-the lack of concordance with the "unapparent framework" (ἁρμονίη ἀφανής) 56 that structures the "manifest" framework of sensory experience-impairs even their seeing and hearing, more precisely, their ability to make sense of their particular sensations by placing them into a wider discursive framework.
Λόγος, discursive "reason," articulates beings into basic pairs of binary conceptual opposites, such as freeman/slave, war/peace, divine/mortal, male/female, 54  day/night, winter/summer, or living/dead. 57 In these binaries, each term is conceptually dependent on its opposite: being free only makes sense in contrast to being a slave and vice versa, being male is meaningful only in distinction to being female, and so on. In this sense, λόγος is also the fundamental unity of discursive meaning: in their interdependency, all opposed terms inextricably belong together and intertwine with their opposites in a differential interplay. Λόγος lets all things belong together as differentiated. As the most perfect framework (καλλίστη ἁρμονία) it is an internally tensional (παλίντροπος) unity, like that of a bow or a lyre, that is, one emerging from the reciprocal agreement (ὁμολογεῖν) of differences or oppositions (διαφέροντα). 58 As such, λόγος is universal and common (ξυνός) to all 59 , the divine law or norm (νόμος) governing all things. 60 Interestingly, Heraclitus seems to compare λόγος to a "light" of intelligibility in fragment B 16 However, in their normal and unreflected everyday mode of experiencing, human beings ignore this universal and law-like character of λόγος and pretend to possess a private and individual discursive capacity of their own. 63 Just as in sleep one leaves the shared world for the private world of one's dreams, humans turn their back to the common structure of rational thought even when awake 64 ; they are "absent even in their presence." 65 To have a barbaric soul is to ignore the universality 57  ὅρασιν] is deceptive." 66 Οἴησις 'presumption' has the double sense of 'conjectural belief' and 'inflated self-confidence'; "the sacred disease" presumably refers here, as in later usage, to epileptic seizures, characterized by a temporary insensibility to external sounds or sights and compared by Aristotle to sleep. 67 In sticking to one's private experience, one is in a dreamlike state, cut off from the common world of logical organization and conceptual articulation, and one's visual impressions become random, superficial, and deceptive.
It seems that for Heraclitus, the value of visual perception as the most "precise witness" among human sensory faculties is entirely subordinate to logical and conceptual structure. "Precision" seems to refer to the superior capacity of sight to make distinctions and to differentiate its field, emphasized, as we saw, by Aristotle. ultimately an ever-living fire 70 in the sense that just as gold is the universal medium of exchange for goods, fire as the all-consuming element is a medium of exchange for all things. 71 Clement tells us that as the fundamental element, the Heraclitean fire is organized by the λόγος that administers (διοικέω) the totality of beings; 72 Hippolytus of Rome explains that everlasting fire is, for Heraclitus, the cause of the internal administration or "economy" (διοίκησις) of the totality of beings, and is itself capable of thought (φρόνιμον). 73 Just as λόγος unites all things by differentiating them, fire distinguishes (κρινεῖ) and comprehends (καταλήψεται) all things. 74 In this sense, the ever-living fire that always was, is, and will be, is the "never-setting light" that illuminates the world-order as a structured and measured totality. 75 Heraclitean "rationalism" thus leaves the bodily senses in a secondary and subordinate position. However, it is important to note that since λόγος is a discursive structure-and thus, in the Greek "phonocentric" perspective, primarily oral and spoken discourse-, there is a clear metaphorical primacy of hearing. . This quotation is from Hippolytus, who seems to read Heraclitus as a prophet of the final conflagration at the Biblical last judgment and therefore uses the future tense. However, there is no reason to suspect that these verbs are not identical to, or equivalent with, the ones actually used by Heraclitus. 75 Heraclitus, DK 22 B 16, 30. Heidegger, in his commentary, suggests reading these fragments together, even though he himself reads the "never-setting light" in the sense of φύσις as constant "emergence-into-presence"; see hearing [ἀκοῦσαι] as well as saying [εἰπεῖν]"; 77 even though they are constantly faced with λόγος, they are "deaf" (κωφοί) to it. 78 And yet λόγος is not a voice, not the audible voice of a human being such as Heraclitus himself, but the voice, the voiceless voice of the discursive structure of being, the fundamental discursiveness that makes all rational discourse possible. "Having heard [ἀκούσαντας] not me but discursive articulation itself, it is well-advised to articulate in agreement [ὁμολογεῖν] with it: All is One [ἓν πάντα εἶναι]." 79 We find then, in Heraclitus, not a metaphysics of sight, not a noetic seeing of supersensible identities with the Platonic "eyes of the soul," 80 but rather a strangely analogous protometaphysics of hearing, characterized by an emphasis on listening to the "unapparent harmony," the soundless discursive articulation of being that makes all merely human vocalization and speaking possible. In his Heraclitus lectures, Heidegger describes this hearing as an "authentic hearing" 81 that he calls "hearkening" (Horchen):

The Vision of Pure Presence: Parmenides' Insight
For a first indication of a metaphysics of sight, we will have to look at Parmenides.
As Nightingale rightly points out, even the outset of Parmenides' Poem is dominated by discourse and hearing, and by a general deprecation of the senses. 83 In the opening of the Poem, which frames it in the imagery of Homeric and Hesiodic epic poetry, the narrator-thinker is carried in a divine carriage upon a "daimonic" path, that is, a mediating way between the mortal and the divine realms. 84 In Sextus Empiricus's highly interesting and not altogether implausible reading of the passage as an allegorical departure from sensory evidence, the screeching wheels on either side of the carriage are likened to the ears, while the "maidens of Sun" leading the way represent the eyes. 85 In any case, the daimonic way leads the thinker beyond the "gates of the paths of Night and Day," that is, beyond the most basic binary oppositions that constitute the discursively articulated and sensuous world of mortal experience, into the divine realm of fundamental unity. 86 Here, the thinker is greeted by an anonymous goddess, who is rather unexpectedly not angered by the thinker's transgression beyond the mortal realm but welcomes him and goes on to disclose her views, impressions, or "acceptances" (δόξαι) 88 of "mortals," that is, of humans in their everyday, unreflective attitude, regarding being. Specifically, the purpose of the teaching is to show how the mortal acceptances inevitably arise and gain their relative justification or acceptability in terms of the "divine" level of evidence. 89 The learning (πυθέσθαι) required of the thinker is of an explicitly acoustic nature: it consists in hearing (ἀκούσαι) the tale or narrative (μῦθος) related by the goddess 90 , and the part on Truth, the source of all true conviction and persuasion (πίστις, Πειθώ) 91 , is also referred to as a "convincing account" (πιστὸς λόγος). 92 Parmenides' goddess is even more explicit than Heraclitus in her censure of reliance on the senses in the quest for fundamental evidence. The "mortals," that is, human beings in their ordinary dealings with the world, are without insight in any respect (εἰδότες οὐδέν) 93 regarding Ἀλήθεια; they are "deaf [κωφοί] as well as blind [τυφλοί]" 94 precisely in that their scope is restricted to the situated and relative perspective of the senses in which things are either contingently there or not, are identical with themselves but different from all other things. They wander about "double-headed" (δίκρανοι) 95 in the sense that they are constantly looking "in two directions," at being (being-there, being-x) and at nonbeing (not-being-there, not- what is fulfilled, τὸ πλέον]. 100 Aristotle quotes this passage to support his claim that Parmenides and many of the other Presocratics failed to make the Platonic distinction between the sensuous and the intelligible, considering all awareness to be sensory in nature. 101 The original context of the passage is left obscure. Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus quotes the same passage in his treatise on sensation, reading it as a part of an elaborate physiological theory of sensation he attributes to Parmenides. 102 However, he does not really interpret the passage, and its connection to the theory he describes, allegedly found in the Δόξαι part of the Poem, remains somewhat obscure. 103 While the majority of scholars-Heidegger among them 104 -have followed Theophrastus's interpretation and placed B 16 among the Δόξαι fragments, it is possible to read it instead as part of the goddess's main argument: 105 it seems that she is here explaining how mortal awareness can be "errant," that is, oriented to the shifting circumstances of particular situations. For the human being, all awareness is fundamentally embodied and thus bound to the particular disposition of the body; humans therefore first and foremost apprehend the situated and contingent objects of the bodily senses. But regardless of these particular objects of sensation, what is fundamentally "minded" and grasped in each situation is the one and the same reality (τὸ γὰρ αὐτό)-that is, the "being there" of the things as such. This basic "thereness" is the dimension that, in an actual act of awareness (νόημα), goes "over and above" all situated perceiving (or: "fulfills" all situated apprehending).
Even though thinking awareness, νόος, is not, for Parmenides, a faculty separate from the bodily senses but always embodied and situated, it is capable of looking away from particular things and of becoming aware of the fundamental identity of all things in their "thereness," their givenness to awareness as such-that What is "absent" in the ordinary sense of the spatial or temporal absence of a particular thing is present insofar as it can be meaningfully thought, that is, intended in thinking and named in discourse-that is, insofar as it is intelligible. As Guido Calogero puts it: "[F]or Parmenides, it is in reality one single concept: if the possibility of being is for him, unwittingly, its intelligibility [pensabilità], its intelligibility, in turn, is its expressibility." 107 Unlike Plato, Parmenides does not separate intelligibility into a realm of its own, apart from its particular spatiotemporal instances. Rather, he regards all particular intelligible things as modifications of intelligibility as such.
We should pay close attention to the first word of this fragment: λεῦσσε 'look,' 'gaze,' 'behold.' This is one of the very rare instances in pre-Platonic texts of an explicitly visual metaphor for an intellectual act of apprehending; it is therefore rather surprising that Heidegger does not pay very much attention to this passage or to B 4 in general. 108 The context is highly significant. The primary task of the learning thinker is to listen to the goddess's narrative account about ἀλήθεια, δόξαι, and their mutual relationship; yet in order to convey her central argument for the transition from mortal δόξαι to the pure intelligible evidence of ἀλήθεια, the goddess resorts to the language of vision, exhorting her hearer to look upon or spectate the pure and absolute presence of all intelligible things to thinking in the sense of meaningful intending, as opposed to the relative presence and relative absence encountered by the "erring" senses. Significantly, the verb λεύσσω is defined by R. A. Prier as a "clear" kind of seeing or beholding that often "describes how a mortal views immortal phenomena" and implies a special, transformative experience. 109 With this visual insight, the internally tensional path of the mortals breaks apart. Pure thinking awareness will not tolerate the internal tension of "there is and there is not", but leaves the thinker only two alternative ways: the way of the absolute "there is" (absolute presence, absolute intelligibility) or the way of the absolute "there is not" (absolute nonpresence, absolute nonintelligibility). 110 But the choice between these is no true choice. The insight developed in B 16 and B 4 is that thinking as such is simply reception of intelligible presence and that being-there as such is simply the givenness of intelligible presence to awareness. Thinking and being-there thus coincide. As the two key aspects of one and the same intelligibility, as receptivity and givenness, thinking (νοεῖν) and being (εἶναι) are one and the same (τὸ γὰρ αὐτό). 111 Thinking is defined by being exclusively bound to presence and excluded from nonpresence. What can be articulated in discourse (λέγειν) and apprehended in thinking (νοεῖν) is simply the "thereness" of intelligible presence; what is not is simply and absolutely nothing, not even one (μηδέν), beyond any kind of intellectual grasping or verbal expression. 112 The "decision" between "there is" and "there is not" has thus always already been decided (κέκριται): "there is not" is to be left alone as unintelligible (ἀνόητον) and nameless (ἀνώνυμον). 113 "Only one account of a way still remains: how there is [ὡς ἔστιν]." 114 This way is then articulated by the goddess in the long fragment B 8, the heart of the Ἀλήθεια part of the Poem, yielding the famous "indications" (σήματα) of being as intelligible presence: absolutely identical with itself, absolutely devoid of any internal or external differentiation or opposition, absolutely simple, self-sufficient, self-contained, homogeneous, and unique. In a word, presence as such is one in all the central senses of the term, and as such, it is pure temporal presence. In the absolute sense, one can never say "there was" or "there will be"; rather, there simply is now (νῦν ἔστιν), "all at once [ὁμοῦ πᾶν], unitarily [ἕν], constantly [συνεχές]." 115 At the end of the fragment, the goddess makes the transition from Ἀλήθεια to the Δόξαι in the form of a brief genealogy of the mortal acceptances. The acceptances arise together with discourse and conceptuality when mortals "establish" the binary oppositions, attaching names to notions of which one can never function without the other, thus differentiating the unity of being into a basic duality. 116 On the basis of the few remaining Δόξαι fragments, it seems clear that this "cosmological" part of the Poem was concerned purely with the fundamental binary opposites of sensuous nature: light/night, warm/cold, right/left, and male/female. 117 Like the Heraclitus fragments, the Poem of Parmenides fundamentally seeks to unfold the ultimate unity of these opposites; however, this unity is not discovered in the differentiating-unifying structure of λόγος, of "the voiceless voice" that thinking must hearken to, but in the prediscursive intendability and intelligibility of things, in the very meaningful accessibility of being that puts it within the reach of discursive articulation. This basic level of evidence is best glimpsed, as we have seen, through a vision of pure presence that is to guide the hearing of the goddess's oral account.

Conclusion
Let us conclude our tentative genealogy. We can see that both Heraclitus and Parmenides seek a way out of the duality of the discursive binary oppositions that, according to Aristotle, dominated the early philosophy of nature; 118 they look for an ultimate unity beyond the contrarieties of discursively articulated being. As Heidegger shows, both are essentially thinkers of ἕν, of the unifying one. 119 However, we have seen that they locate this fundamental unity differently. Heraclitus discovers it in the differentiating structure of discursive and conceptual articulation itself-as differentiating, discursiveness also precisely unifies in making the opposites interdependent moments of the "internally tensional" framework that is a perfect