Heidegger's specialized view of pre-socratics. AI

Perplexity

Heidegger's specialized view of pre-socratics
Heidegger treats the pre‑Socratics not as “primitive physicists” but as the first and uniquely privileged thinkers of Being, whose sayings preserve an originary disclosure (aletheia as unconcealment) that later metaphysics covers over.

Why the pre‑Socratics matter for Heidegger
He sees them as the inaugural “beginning” of Western thinking, where Being first comes to speech before it hardens into metaphysical doctrine.

Their fragments are not historical curiosities but a “heritage” that must be thoughtfully repeated to reopen the question of Being in the present.


​ The history of philosophy is read as a history of a gradual “forgetting of Being,” and the pre‑Socratics stand closest to the still‑unforgotten beginning.

​ Method: “Thoughtful repetition” and philology
Heidegger does not read them as doxographical sources about views on elements (water, air, apeiron) but as condensed sayings in which Being lets itself be said in an early way.

​ His readings involve radical re‑translations of key Greek terms (physis, logos, aletheia, dikē, moira), deliberately breaking with standard scholarly philology to recover their “pre‑metaphysical” sense.

This approach is a hermeneutic retrieval: he both listens to the Greeks and re‑poses their questions from within our own historical situation.

​ Heraclitus and Parmenides: truth and physis
Heraclitus and Parmenides are for Heidegger the central figures of the first beginning because they think Being as physis and aletheia, not yet as “substance,” “subject,” or “object.”

Physis is read as the self‑emerging, self‑showing coming‑to‑presence of beings, not as “nature” in the later physical sense.

​ Aletheia is “unconcealment,” the event in which beings come into openness; only later is truth reduced to correctness of propositions.

Heidegger emphasizes that appearance (doxa) belongs to unconcealment itself: seeming is not just illusion beside Being but a mode of its self‑showing, which later metaphysics misreads.

​ Anaximander: justice, time, and Being
Heidegger’s reading of the Anaximander fragment is paradigmatic of his specialized view.

Instead of a moralized “paying penalty for injustice,” he hears a saying about the way beings emerge and withdraw in accord with the order of Being and time.

Origin and destruction are interpreted as appearing and disappearing of beings from out of the boundless, in a measured “fitting” (dikē) that belongs to Being itself rather than to ethical transgression.

​ Time here is not a neutral container but the ordinance within which beings rise, linger, and depart, showing the dynamic “presencing and absencing” that Heidegger later calls Ereignis.

Distinctive features of Heidegger’s stance
He privileges the pre‑Socratics over much of later philosophy, sometimes speaking as if Being manifested itself more originally to them than to subsequent thinkers.

Yet he also insists that their beginning is not simply to be restored; it must be “repeated” within our own historical situation, after the long path of metaphysics and its technological culmination.

His view is thus both historical and ontological: the pre‑Socratics mark a unique historical event (the first beginning) and, at the same time, they articulate structures of disclosure (physis, aletheia, logos, dikē) that still underlie our experience of Being today.

If you’d like, I can go fragment‑by‑fragment (Heraclitus B50 on logos, Parmenides’ proem, Anaximander’s dictum) and map each to specific Heideggerian themes like Ereignis, the “clearing,” or the history of truth.