Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Parmenides: Seele als Sensorium der Transzendenz -> Heraklit

Kurzinhalt: We can speculate about transcendent Being because the soul is a sensorium of transcendence ... Such an exploration of the soul was the work of Heraclitus

Textausschnitt: 292a The speculation of Parmenides intensely concentrates on the experience of the "Is!" The light of the Logos is focused, within the much wider revelatory range of the poem, on the one experience that relegates everything else into Notbeing. If one breaks, therefore, with the historiographic tradition of classifying Parmenides as "the philosopher of Being," and recognizes the non-logified sectors of his works as quite as essential as his logification of the "Is!," several areas of subject matter can be distinguished and arranged on a scale of diminishing logical penetration. The area of maximal penetration is the experience of the "Is!", the second area is the realm of Doxa where Parmenides recognizes the possibility of more or less "likely" symbolizations, without arriving at clearness about the criterion; the third area is the revelatory sphere of the Prologue where even the question of doxic likelihood disappears; and the fourth area (if one may call it by that name) is the ontological gap between the realms of Being and Notbeing where not even an attempt at symbolization is made. The experience of the way from darkness to light, and of the light-vision itself, has absorbed the speculative powers of Parmenides to the point of neglecting all other experiential areas as sources of cognition that would merit an equally careful speculative articulation. In particular, we noted the purely logical structure of Being, excluding not only matter but mind, will, and creativeness as well. One component of life of the soul has asserted itself with blinding force. This is the strength of Parmenides; he has fully experienced the inner dimension of the soul, as it were its height that is domed by transcendent Being. And the paradigmatic articulation of this inner dimension has become part of the philosophia perennis.1 (Fs) (notabene)

293a If, thus, we place the philosophy of Being into the wider context of Parmenides' poem, the direction becomes visible in which the further exploration of the soul was bound to advance. Being comes into grasp because the thinker has achieved consciousness of the inner dimension of his soul; with the understanding of the soul as a something that has an inner dimension, there is correlatively given the consciousness of a border of this something and of a Beyond of this border. Being is not discovered by a static man, for in the act of discovery the soul of man itself differentiates and gains consciousness of its dimension. With the Parmenidean consciousness of the way that leads toward the border of transcendence, the soul itself moves into the field of philosophical speculation. We can speculate about transcendent Being because the soul is a sensorium of transcendence. The light of Parmenides cannot be seen without a light in the soul that illuminates the way toward its border. Hence, the further advance of speculation had to be intimately bound up with a systematic exploration of the inner dimension of the soul, of the manifold of the experiential sources of knowledge that alone can authenticate speculation and raise it above mere "likelihood." Such an exploration of the soul was the work of Heraclitus. (Fs) (notabene)