A reader of Heidegger’s Parmenides lecture course (winter 1942-43) took a sweeping passage from Heidegger’s Table of Contents (often very densely synoptic) and paraphrased a vivid sense of Heidegger’s genealogical sense of historicality (re: pp. 45—54 of the English translation of the course):
The imperial, as the governing authority, reflects divine order in creation’s unfolding movement. The link between truth and its essence emerges in Roman-Christian thought, where truth denotes divinely established rightness, opposing falsehood. Aligned with openness, truth echoes the Greek notion of unconcealment, set against hiddenness, within a framework of emanation from a singular source. Since Plato, unconcealment’s nature transforms through rational definition, integrated into truth as ecclesiastical justice. In evangelical thought, redemption restores humanity’s divine likeness, aligning with a mode of existence renewed by grace. Cartesian certainty, rooted in proper reason, reframes truth as intellectual assurance, tied to creative mind. Kant’s framework limits truth to human cognition, akin to contemplative insight. Nietzsche’s redefinition of truth as justice returns to divine order without sacred grounding. This historical arc confines unconcealment within truth, rightness, and justice, obscuring its dynamic vitality. The final return transcends this, uniting existence and non-existence in ineffable divine radiance, where truth manifests through divine appearances, surpassing affirmation and negation in the ascent to the uncreated source.Western intellectual historicality institutes overriding conceptuality especially relative to the few singularities (conceptual geniuses),
the rare historicities which emerge to prevail.
That’s about conceptuality, not ontology. (Well, it’s about ontological pretenses, but that’s mythical implicature.)
The paradigmatic conceivers become historical, in a generative sense: They are being historical in their singularity.
Appreciating their historical singularity is exemplary of thinking historically, literally being historical in thinking.
But, in the wake of a tragic 20th century, the challenge for new sensibilities is to develop, to individuate oneself, with due appreciation of one’s historicity as partially historical (a fate of growing up in very-developed, historical times, thank goodness), yet being individual, being individuated, maybe even becoming singular (though not by arrogant pretense) by participating in the generativity of our shared potentials, i.e., maybe contributing to inceptions which constellate some progress, some re-grounding of our shared, ongoing futurity.
It is not given that our children’s children will have a quality of life comparable to what our history—Our evolving!—has given us to further—Given Time to care deeply, far, highly, and sacredly about giving time! (That’s Heidegger’s Fourfold).
The challenge that Heidegger called to thinking was not scholasticism toward his ways (let alone his life). The challenge is to turn away from “us” (after partnering with him through so many of his waymaking texts), to find one’s ownmost path, and thus to possibly contribute to our shared humanity in this life, this century, this open futurity.
"Art is history,” he says, “in the essential sense that it is the ground of history" ("Origin of the Work of Art").
For example, if I may: a BlueSky posting today on “Ukraine and the future of humanity”
This discussion is part of many discussions of my project of Heideggerr studies.
