to take just one example, every "science" is a cognitive mastering, an outdoing, and a surpassing, if indeed not a complete bypassing, of a being. All of which occurs in the manner of objectivization. Versus this, essential knowing, heedfulness, is a retreat in face of Being. In such retreating we see and we perceive essentially more, namely something quite different from the product of the remarkable procedure of modern science. For the latter is always a technical attack on a being and an intervention for purposes of an "orientation" toward acting, "producing," wheeling and dealing. Thoughtful heedfulness, in contrast. is attention to a claim that does not arise from the separate facts and events of reality and does not concern man in the superficiality of his everyday occupations. Only when this claim of Being, and not some objectivity or other out of the multiplicity of beings, addresses us in the word of Parmenides will the knowledge of his "propositions" have any justification. Without paying attention to this claim, whatever care we might contrive in the clarification of his thinking occurs in a void.
The order of our clarification of the individual fragments is determined by an interpretation of the leading thoughts. We base the separate clarifications on this interpretation, one which, of course, can only gradually come to light. The individual fragments are numbered in Roman numerals. We shall begin, it would seem arbitrarily, with the first fragment and specifically with verses 22-32.
I. 22-32.
22 And the goddess received me with sympathy; she took my right hand in her hand; then she spoke the word and addressed me in this way: "O man, companion of immortal charioteers,
25 arriving at our home with the steeds that convey you. Blessing be bestowed on you! For it is not an evil fate which has sent you ahead to travel on this way-and truly this way is apart from men, outside their (trodden) path-but. rather, rule and order. There is, however, a need that you experience everything, both the stable heart of well-enclosing unconcealment.
30 as well as the appearing in its appearance to mortals, where there is no relying on the unconcealed. Also this, however, you will learn to experience: how the appearing
32 (in the need) remains called upon to be apparent. while it shines through everything and (hence) in that way brings everything to perfection.
The thinker Parmenides tells of a goddess who greets him as he arrives at her home in the course of his travels. To the greeting, whose proper essence the goddess herself clarifies, she adds an announcement of the revelations she has in store for the thinker as he goes his way. Hence everything the thinker says in the subsequent fragments of the