The distinctive contribution of The Beginning of Western Philosophy lies in its rigorous presentation of an inaugural confrontation between Heidegger’s post–Being and Time reorientation toward the question of Beyng and the earliest preserved articulations in Greek thought that first ventured to let “beings as a whole” emerge into question. Through a close, philologically attentive yet methodologically radical interpretation of Anaximander’s dictum and Parmenides’ didactic poem, the lecture course establishes an interpretive field in which the inception of Western philosophy becomes thinkable as a historically determinate event: an emergent attunement to the problem of Being itself, prior to metaphysics, prior to the later sedimentations of representation, and prior to the subject–object schema. The text’s decisive stake, therefore, is the demonstration that the question of Being did not arise from theoretical curiosity but from an originary transformation in existence — a transformation that remains binding upon any future reawakening of philosophical questioning.
The logic of the lecture course unfolds from this initial stake outward, yet always circles back to it in an intensifying spiral. The composition itself — a sequence of interpretations interspersed with what Heidegger calls interposed considerations — discloses its aim not through linear progression but through a continual re-activation of the same problem: how the earliest Greeks began to ask the question of Being, and how that beginning still addresses us when we attempt a historically lucid re-asking. The method is neither philological reconstruction nor metaphysical archaeology; it is a searching attunement to what in the Greek words calls for thought, but now calls through the distance of two and a half millennia. This attunement requires what the lecture repeatedly demands: a relinquishing, a releasing of inherited conceptions, so that the authenticity of the inception might become audible. Heidegger thereby renders the lecture’s form inseparable from its philosophical intention; the movement of the text performs the very beginning it describes, attempting to let the question of Being become question-worthy again.
The opening meditations on Anaximander already exhibit this layered compositional strategy. Heidegger begins by confronting the apparent poverty of the surviving material — a few lines, scarcely more than a rumor of thought — and treating this poverty not as an obstacle but as an index of the magnitude of the inception. The dictum is approached through the insistence that its traditional translation into talk of “elements,” “basic matter,” or “natural philosophy” conceals precisely what needs unfolding. The text thus begins with a clearing-away of misunderstandings, but this clearing is itself a philosophical operation: it reveals that the earliest Greek question cannot be captured by later conceptual oppositions. The supposed “basic matter,” archē, must instead be understood as something like an originary sway of coming-forth and withdrawal, a primordial surge (Anfang) in which beings emerge into presence and depart into absence. Already here Heidegger stresses the tension between the whence and the whither — the ek hon / eis tauta — and interprets this tension not as a causal sequence but as a disclosure of the manner in which presence is always accompanied by a counter-movement that belongs intrinsically to presence itself. Presence becomes thinkable only in the encounter with absence, and the dictum does not describe physical transformation but the essential dynamic of beings as a whole. The lecture thus begins by displaying how the inception of Western philosophy emerges from a confrontation with the event-character of beings rather than from speculative hypotheses about the world.
At the same time, the text steadily draws attention to what remains unasked, and to how the earliest questioners stood on the boundary between concealment and unconcealment. This gesture is essential to the structure of the work. Heidegger emphasizes—through explicit remarks and through the pauses built into his interpretive rhythm—that Anaximander’s words speak from within a still-unshaken nearness to the experience of Being, yet without articulating that experience as such. The dictum gives voice to a dawning sense of the essential relation between presence, absence, and necessity (chreon), yet does so in a manner that precedes the later ontological framework through which we ordinarily interpret these terms. Heidegger therefore proceeds not by explaining what Anaximander “meant” but by preparing the ground on which his words can be allowed to show their inner movement. This preparatory task already transforms the reader’s comportment: the lecture ceases to be a commentary and becomes an exercise in participating in the beginning. That is why the interposed considerations — on existence, on the understanding of Being, on the slackening and intensification of questioning — are not digressions but integral components of the interpretive act.
The interpretive procedure itself reveals a fundamental tension that the lecture exploits methodically. On the one hand, the text ties itself closely to the fragments, grounding every step in the specific words preserved by tradition. On the other hand, it continually shifts attention from the words to the problem that grants them their sense. This alternation produces a distinctive kind of philosophical density: the fragments are treated as signs pointing toward an originary experience of Being that they themselves struggle to articulate. In this sense, the lecture course uses philology as a ladder to be climbed and then withdrawn; once the primordial question glimmers through the textual surface, the words become part of a larger constellation of meaning that exceeds their explicit formulation. The method therefore enacts what the lecture names the “co-beginning” — the simultaneous interpretation of the Greek inception and re-asking of the question of Being within the present. By bringing the fragments into a clearing shaped by this doubled beginning, Heidegger allows them to speak in a voice that is neither historical reconstruction nor contemporary projection but a mutual illumination of past and present within the horizon of the question of Being.
From this vantage point, the transition to Parmenides no longer appears as a shift of topic but as the necessary intensification of the problem that Anaximander first allowed to appear. Heidegger explicitly frames §17 as the moment in which the question of Being becomes explicit and coherent for the first time in the history of philosophy. The interpretive strategy here mirrors the structure of the course as a whole: the movement from the sparse glimpse provided by Anaximander to the more extensive textual corpus of Parmenides becomes the very movement from the dawn of the question to its first attempt at conceptual clarity. Yet this movement does not abandon the originary obscurity of the beginning; instead, it brings that obscurity to light by letting the goddess of Alētheia in Parmenides’ poem articulate the difference between the possible and impossible ways of thought. Heidegger’s intense focus on the three ways — the way of Being, the way of non-being, and the ambiguous middle way that “is and is not” — becomes the entry into the deepest problematic of the inception: how the disclosure of Being entails the simultaneous possibility of seeming, error, and semblance. The extent to which Parmenides binds noein (apprehending) to einai (Being) becomes for Heidegger the decisive clue for understanding the unity of truth and Being at the dawn of Western thought.
This is also the point where the lecture’s compositional structure becomes most intricate. The interposed considerations between the Anaximander and Parmenides sections — particularly the analyses of existence, the understanding of Being, and the slackening and reawakening of questioning — now reveal themselves as a necessary bridge. Without these meditations, the reader could not enter the poem’s difficult terrain. Only after the existential clarification of what it means that we ask the question of Being can the poem’s account of the ways be interpreted as more than an abstract doctrine. The lecture therefore guides the reader through a sequence of transformations: first a clearing of inherited misunderstandings, then an attunement to the inception, then a grounding of the existential dimension of questioning, and finally a release into the dense conceptual terrain of Parmenides’ poem. The parts of the course merge into each other through this logic of preparation and enactment, each part displacing the previous one not by negation but by gathering it into a more originary horizon.
Now, as this horizon broadens, the complexity of the poem’s central claims increases. The analysis of fragment 1, with its imagery of the chariot, the gates, the maidens, and the goddess, is treated not as mythological ornament but as a symbolic unfolding of the path into the question of Being. Heidegger shows how the poem’s setting — the traveler drawn beyond the ordinary realm of human familiarity — establishes a pathic relation to truth. The journey motif expresses an existential transition: the one who asks is drawn out of the everyday and into the unshielded openness where Being announces itself. The goddess’s distinction between the ways of Being and non-being is not a logical axiom but a demand that thought align itself with the self-showing of Being. The rejection of the third way is equally decisive: it indicates the impossibility of grounding knowledge in semblance, and instructs that semblance must be interpreted only from within the clearing of Being, never as an alternative to it.
From this point the methodological function of the poem comes into view. The imagery of journey, chariot, and goddess is read as a symbolic presentation of the guidance that thought receives when it allows itself to be led by Being. The poem stages an initiation into a way of questioning, and Heidegger insists that this initiation concerns the reader’s own stance as much as the text’s content. The goddess does not simply declare doctrines; she directs the hearer toward and away from paths, indicates what kind of question aligns with Being and what kind of question dissolves into confusion. The first fragment thus becomes a propaedeutic: it discloses that there are essentially distinct ways of approaching the question of what is, and that the decisive issue is less the possession of correct propositions than the adherence to a path that allows beings to appear in accordance with their Being. This path-character of inquiry is what the lecture seeks to awaken in its audience, and the long preparatory analysis of imagery, circumstance, and address serves to shift attention away from an objectifying attitude toward an understanding of philosophy as a disciplined journey into the openness of Being itself.
The subsequent examination of fragments 4 and 5 deepens this insight by articulating the ways themselves and, above all, by elaborating the enigmatic claim that Being and apprehending belong together. Heidegger shows that Parmenides, through the words of the goddess, draws a sharp boundary between the way on which “it is and it is impossible that it is not” and the way on which “it is not and it is necessary that it is not,” with a third, mixed way that speaks of what both is and is not. The lecture treats this not as a primitive logical classification but as a first, extremely concentrated articulation of the difference between a thinking that lets Being present itself, a thinking that nullifies the very possibility of presence, and a thinking that oscillates in the unstable region of semblance. The decisive formula that Being and apprehending intrinsically belong together is taken as the central statement grounding the distinction between these ways: to apprehend authentically is to be aligned with Being’s self-showing; to relinquish this alignment is to fall into paths that cannot lead anywhere. Yet Heidegger also insists that this foundational claim lacks an explicit grounding in Parmenides; the poem presupposes an understanding of the unity of Being and apprehension that it does not fully unfold. The lecture seizes exactly on this ungroundedness as an indication of the inceptual situation: at the beginning, the key connections are in force without yet being conceptually secured. The task of thinking that follows this beginning will therefore consist in retrieving and grounding what was first experienced and stated without explicit justification.
Fragments 6 and 7, as interpreted in the course, extend the meditation on possible and impossible ways. Heidegger emphasizes that the third way—where one says “it is and it is not”—is more than a logical curiosity; it is the path of opinion, of those who speak from the spectacle of appearing things without having clarified their relation to Being. This third way is characterized by a lack of genuine indication: it does not truly know where it goes, because it does not know what it means when it speaks of “being” and “non-being”. The lecture stresses that the absence of a correct indication of the way is the sign of an underlying lack of understanding of Being itself. Here, the analysis of Parmenides intersects directly with the earlier considerations about our own historical situation. The contemporary slackening of the question of Being appears, in the light of Parmenides’ warning, as a descent into a constantly shifting third way, where assertions proliferate, opinions oppose one another, and yet the measure of Being remains unasked. Heidegger’s reading of these fragments thus reinforces the idea that the earliest Greek attempt to distinguish ways of thought already points toward the possibility of errancy and semblance as essential counterparts of truth, and that our present historical configuration of philosophy can be diagnosed as a radicalization of that third way into which the question of Being has sunk.
Against this background, the interpretation of fragment 8 acquires its central importance. The lecture treats this fragment as the place where the first way is fully traveled, the path on which Being itself comes into view as a structured unity of determinations, the so-called sēmata—the marks or signs of Being. Heidegger carefully reconstructs how the goddess enumerates these sēmata, distinguishing a first group that can be characterized as “negative” (Being is without origin, without passing away, without division, without lack) and a second group that is “affirmative” (Being is whole, unique, continuous, present, self-same). This enumeration is not read as a set of predicates added to a pre-given subject but as a gradual focusing of a single vision: as the course of proof proceeds, the respects no longer stand beside each other; they are gathered into a unified prospect in which Being shows itself as pure presence. The decisive outcome is that the unity of these sēmata proves Being to be the present in an eminent sense: that which stands in itself, with no room for a “not,” no opening for absence within its own domain. Every appeal back to the axiom that “the same is for thinking and for Being” consolidates this vision, securing the entire prospect toward the hen, the unique One. The axiom is thus both starting-point and goal; it expresses, in compressed form, the very unity that the enumeration of sēmata gradually brings into view.
At this juncture, Heidegger introduces the problem of Being as agenēton, without origin. The lecture explores how the poem excludes any whence of Being: if Being had a source, it would depend on something other than itself, and then would no longer be the unique, self-grounding One that the sēmata describe. Yet this exclusion of origin is also directed against a specific misunderstanding: the understanding of Being that prevails on the level of doxa, where Being is treated as something that comes to be from a prior condition, whether elemental, cosmological, or theological. The lecture shows that the poem itself anticipates this misunderstanding and counters it by returning to the axiom: the thought that would derive Being from something else must already presuppose Being as the horizon within which such derivation is thinkable. Semblance appears here as a possible whence of Being: one could imagine that our idea of Being arises from the spectacle of changeable things, and that the unity and constancy of Being are projected onto the flux of phenomena. Yet Heidegger insists that Parmenides’ axiom blocks this route. If Being and apprehending belong together, then the apprehending of Being cannot arise from semblance, because semblance as such has meaning only within the field of Being. The poem’s recourse to Dikē, compliance or disposing justice, further clarifies this point: the impossibility of a whence for Being coincides with the impossibility of a whither. Being neither comes from elsewhere nor goes elsewhere; it stands in its own measure, and that standing is what justice, in the inceptual sense, maintains.
From here the lecture pushes toward an interpretation of Parmenides’ temporal statement. By identifying Being with the present in its purest sense, Parmenides articulates a temporal structure that differs both from later notions of eternity and from everyday notions of time. Being is present in such a way that every trace of the “not yet” or “no longer” is excluded. This does not mean that Being lies outside time in a vague “eternal” realm; rather, the present itself is intensified into a mode in which the usual temporal “nots” (not yet, no longer) have no place. Heidegger emphasizes that the poem’s rigorous rejection of absence within Being does not aim at a metaphysical absolutization but at clarifying the specific way in which Being gives itself to thought: as a presence so self-coincident that it tolerates no admixture of non-being. The various returns to the axiom reinforce this; every time the argument threatens to slip into a picture of Being as a colossal object among others, the axiom recalls us to the fundamental unity of Being and apprehending. Being is present as that which thinking already stands within; the present is not a point on a line but a pervasive horizon within which absence is always already held in its own mode. The insertion of fragment 2, which thematizes apeonta, the absent ones, makes this explicit: all absence lies in the sphere of presence, because only what is present in some way can be said to be absent.
The discussion of logos and noein, speaking and apprehending, completes the treatment of the first way. Heidegger argues that Parmenides anticipates a belonging-together of thinking and saying that later philosophy will only partially retrieve. The belonging-together of noein and legein means that the articulation of Being is not an external commentary added to an inner intuition; speech is already an enactment of the alignment with Being. When the poem speaks, it does not report about Being from a distance; it lets Being stand forth in a specific saying that is itself governed by the unity of the sēmata and the axiom. The lecture uses this insight to reflect on its own procedure: it too seeks a saying that does not simply manipulate representational contents but allows the question of Being to come to speech. In this sense, the analysis of Parmenides’ poem becomes a mirror in which the lecture course recognizes its own stakes. The composition of the book, with its alternation between close exegesis and meditative digression, can be seen as an attempt to inhabit the unity of noein and legein in a contemporary situation where that unity has been dispersed.
Yet the course does not end with the first way. Precisely because the inceptual thinking of Being closes itself so strictly against non-being, the question of semblance and opinion presses itself forward. The long treatment of the doxa-fragments, especially fragment 9 with its doctrine of light and night, serves to elaborate how Parmenides himself recognized a second, derivative domain of disclosure. Heidegger’s reading here is especially intricate. Light and darkness, day and night, are treated as the primary appearances: they are the basic ways in which things manifest or withdraw. Appearance is understood as a looming up, a standing-out in relief, a predominance; even semblance is granted a positive force, far from any pallid connotation. Light and darkness configure all stepping forth and receding; they guide the entire play of world-appearance. The changeable manifold of things—household objects, familiar surroundings, natural phenomena—arises as a diakosmos, an arrangement and distribution of this alternation of light and dark.
However, these appearing things pass themselves off as beings. Semblance presents itself as alleged Being. The lecture shows how the duality of light and darkness, with its constantly shifting “according to circumstances,” makes possible a realm in which appearances dominate discourse and orientation. Human speech gives names on the basis of these appearances, establishing episimēma, marks that are posited onto things, behind which what shows itself is both concealed and recognizable. Heidegger underscores that these episimēma differ from the sēmata of Being: they are not originary signs of Being’s own manner of presence, but supplementary masks that stabilize the play of semblance for practical and cognitive purposes. The world of opinion arises precisely through this masking, and yet opinion remains rooted in the more originary disclosure of Being and appearance. The fragments on birth as the basic occurrence of becoming, on the history of the appearance of the world, on apprehension and corporeality, are interpreted as attempts to describe how the interplay of light and darkness gives rise to a world in which everything that appears is composed of these two powers, and in which even the dead, the no-longer living, apprehend cold and silence. This striking idea that all beings in some manner apprehend signals that Parmenides extends the unity of Being and apprehending even into the domain of semblance: Being itself apprehends, and what appears does so on the basis of this primal apprehending.
The treatment of doxa thus does not simply oppose opinion to truth; it develops an inner relation between them. The way of doxa is indeed the way of errancy, the path on which beings as they appear seduce thought into taking them as ultimate. Yet this seduction is possible only because semblance bears the stamp of the hen; the manifold is “something like Being” precisely in its constancy of play. Heidegger retrieves from Parmenides a subtle insight: errancy is grounded in the very structure of appearance that truth also requires. Light enables seeing and misseeing; darkness withholds and deceives; day proceeds from night into night and thereby reveals its own nullifying character. Any attempt to privilege one of these respects violates necessity. The thinker who runs ahead of all established views, as in a race, maintains a vantage from which the entire manifold of appearances is recognized as issuing from the originary pair of light and darkness. This thinker is thereby secured against mistaking these appearances for beings themselves. In this depiction, Parmenides does not merely denounce opinion; he delineates the complex field in which opinion emerges and in which the possibility of an alignment with Being must constantly be won anew.
At this point the course reconverges with the interposed considerations. The long middle part of the book—those sections that examine objections, meditate on our current situation, clarify the concept of existence, and elaborate the understanding of Being as transcendence—has been, up to now, functioning as a concealed framework. It is here that this framework steps fully into view. Heidegger’s reflection on the “negative relation to the beginning” thematizes our ordinary distance from the inception of Western philosophy. We are like a wanderer who has long since left the spring from which he first drank; he believes he has dissolved his connection to it, yet he perishes through that very distancing. The beginning has become for us something that we “cannot do anything with,” something antique, crude, or abstract. In this self-delusion we imagine that the poverty of the surviving fragments proves their theoretical meagerness, whereas in fact it only displays our lack of measure for the monumentality of the beginning.
The meditation on the current situation intensifies this diagnosis. The “we” who ask about the beginning are not an abstract humanity but a historically determinate existence that has been shaped by the long history of metaphysics and its culmination in modernity. Nietzsche appears as the thinker who most incisively expresses this situation: the death of God and the consequent collapse of traditional values reveal that the ground on which Western humanity stood has dissolved. Yet this dissolution also uncovers an older abandonment: the abandonment of the question of Being. In the face of this, Heidegger articulates what he calls the grounding utterance of Being: an attempt to characterize the beginning as the event in which the question of Being was first posed as the most originary, first, and last question. Questioning is analyzed here in its essence: as a comportment that does not merely seek information but discloses Being by letting it come into question. Various modes of questioning are distinguished, and the question of Being is located as the one that grounds all others, since every inquiry presupposes some prior understanding of what it means to say that something is.
The subsequent sections on the actual asking of the question of Being bring into relief a paradox that runs through the entire course. On the one hand, the question of Being is the most unproblematic; we use “is” constantly and without hesitation, diversify Being into thatness, whatness, suchness, and trueness, and move among these dimensions with ease. On the other hand, this very unproblematic character makes the question of Being the most deeply forgotten. The understanding of Being remains a fact of our existence, yet it is dis-esteemed, pushed into the background behind our concern with beings. Heidegger shows that the familiar linguistic usage that connects Being with becoming, with the “ought,” with thinking, and with semblance conceals an originary unity. The question of Being appears provisional and narrow when it is treated as one topic among others; in truth it holds together all these modes. Its definitive lack of question-worthiness in ordinary life is precisely what calls for a renewed effort to make it question-worthy again.
From this point the analysis turns explicitly to existence. Unrest is described as the experience of questioning: existence is that way of being human in which the question of Being presses, even when it is suppressed. The origin of existence lies in the esteeming of Being; to exist is to stand in a stance that takes Being to matter. The lecture portrays the history of Western humanity as a history of the slackening of this insistence on beings as a whole. At first there is a concentrated insistence that allows the question of Being to emerge; later, insistence relaxes, until finally a complete dis-esteeming of Being seems possible. Yet Heidegger argues that a truly complete dis-esteeming is impossible: the understanding of Being cannot be eliminated, only covered over. Our existence continues to be grounded in an understanding of Being that we ignore.
This leads to the decisive determination of existence as grounded in transcendence. The understanding of Being is shown to have priority over all comportment to beings; it is not a concept abstracted from experience but the pre-conceptual horizon within which any experience and any comportment are possible. To say that humans exist is to say that their essence consists in standing out beyond beings toward Being. Transcendence, in this sense, does not designate a highest object, an ultimate “transcendent” entity; it names the very act of surpassing beings in order to let them be as beings. Existence is, in its essential ground, transcendence. This redefinition has immediate consequences for the interpretation of the Greek beginning. The Greeks did not articulate existence in this way, yet their initial questioning of Being already presupposed a mode of human being for whom Being matters. Heidegger therefore treats his own existential analytic as a kind of hermeneutical preparation for understanding Anaximander and Parmenides: only if we grasp ourselves as those beings whose essence is the understanding of Being can we release ourselves into the inceptual questioning that their fragments attest.
The discussion of “liberation toward freedom” completes the integration of these interposed considerations into the overall architecture of the book. Freedom is not characterized as arbitrary choice but as the sovereignty of existence, the capacity to stand within the open region of Being without collapsing back into mere insistence on beings. The question of Being becomes here the closest proximity of existence: it is the ground of our inner possibility, and in that sense it is closer to us than any particular being. Yet this very closeness makes the question easy to overlook; it withdraws into the self-evidence of the “is”. The unasked question of Being is thus in the closest proximity of existence. The historical task becomes the re-asking of this question, a task Heidegger describes as a re-beginning of the initial beginning. To begin again the beginning does not mean to repeat Greek doctrines; it means to allow what occurred there—this first co-belonging of Being and questioning—to occur again in a transformed historical situation.
Seen from this perspective, the interpretive sequence of the lecture course reveals a distinctive compositional logic. The Anaximander part initiates a first confrontation with the earliest transmitted pronouncement, unfolds its unitary content around the central core of noncompliance and compliance, day and night, contour and contourlessness, and then already hints at a difference between Being and beings through the analysis of to apeiron as the empowering power of appearance. The interposed considerations then interrupt this Greek exegesis with a sustained questioning of our own relation to the beginning, our conceptions of existence, and our understanding of Being. This interruption does not merely suspend the first part; it transforms the horizon within which Anaximander’s dictum can be appropriated. When the course then turns to Parmenides, the earlier material has been displaced by a more comprehensive framework in which the Greek beginning can appear as an essential moment in a longer history of the question of Being. Finally, the in-depth analysis of the didactic poem, with its journey through the ways, its enumeration of sēmata, and its elaboration of doxa, folds back into the concluding reflection on the inceptual question of Being and the law of philosophy.
The closing §24 distills this entire movement into a sober, almost ascetic assessment. We have only proceeded a small distance in co-asking the inceptual question of Being. The course acknowledges that its own result is modest: perhaps it has achieved only the insight into what one should refrain from asking if one truly wants to grasp. Yet precisely this negative gain has weight. Being has begun to become question-worthy again; the worn-out “is” has shown itself to contain something to be grasped. The law of philosophy—the unique measure proper to the questioning of Being—stands over against our usual ways of thinking. We can either expose ourselves to this law and sustain it, or keep away from it and drift within the placid multiplicity of opinions. What remains, Heidegger says, is the shocking greatness of this slight labor: a labor that has been standing for two millennia and will continue to stand, especially against the idle talk and pen-pushing of a culture that has forgotten its own beginning.
In this way, The Beginning of Western Philosophy presents itself as more than a historical lecture on Anaximander and Parmenides. It is a rigorously composed attempt to inhabit the tension between an origin that first unleashed the question of Being and a present in which that question has sunk into unproblematic usage. The course transforms the fragments of the earliest thinkers into a mirror in which our own existence is called to account. By tracing the movement from an initial, sparse pronouncement about beings as a whole, through the first explicit unfolding of the ways of thought, into the intricate play of truth and semblance, the text makes clear that Western philosophy begins in a struggle over the possibility of questioning itself. Its distinctive contribution lies in the way it lets that struggle resound again: as a demand that we relearn to esteem Being, to stand in transcendence, and to take upon ourselves the task of beginning the beginning anew.
Simon Gros 
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