Abstract

When asked in his Zahringen seminar of 1973 to approach the question of Being via mediation on the phenomenology of Husserl , Martin Heidegger eventually turns the focus of the discussion toward Parmenides' now classical tautology: Being is, . To inquire phenomenologically is to take as one's theme that identity ) of Being) and thinking ) which Parmenides announces in his poem, "The Way of Truth and the Way of Seeming." The original meaning of phenomenology for Heidegger, as a possibility for thought rather than as an actual philosophical movement, is as "tautological thinking." Moreover, to the extent that Parmenides achieves for the first time a direct access to Being through the examination of that privileged being which is to be conceived in its relationship to Being, and to the extent that this access is gained neither through a derivation of Being through a table of judgment nor through a "categorial intuition" which models this Seinsverstandnis in sensibility and its intuition , to this extent a return to Parmenides can aid the phenomenologist in recovering that experience of Being which is direct, originary, and unprejudiced by the accumulated strata of traditional metaphysics. ;Given this connection between Parmenides, Husserl, phenomenology, and the Seinsfrage, we ask in this text the following question: What role of Heidegger's reading of the Parmenides poem play in the formation of his early idea of phenomenology? To address this question, we have followed the outline below: An exposition of the Zahringen seminar in order to arrive at the clues necessary for placing the Parmenides interpretation within the proper phenomenological context. The interpretation of Heidegger's three pivotal works of 1927 in which we hear the most extensive treatment on phenomenology: his draft for Husserl's article "Phenomenology" for the Encyclopedia Britannica, his Marburg lectures entitled Die Grundprobleme der Phanomenologie, and his best known work, Sein und Zeit. From these we reach a more complete idea of the foundations of this phenomenological method. An examination and interpretation of the explicit references to Parmenides in the three texts, and their exposition as relevant in the discussion of the idea of phenomenology. A reconstruction of the Parmenides poem along the lines provided by the examination of phenomenology so as to recreate as much as possible the importance of pharmenides' contribution as a whole to the formation of Heidegger's thought in the early years