(JB2015)
[…] there are no “logical” grounds for this primacy of unity over multiplicity. Rather, logical thinking already presupposes the structure of logos highlighted by Heraclitus: unity-in-difference, the discursive formation of internally articulated meaningful wholes. Logos as discursiveness is a differentiating as well as unifying network of meaningfulness. When a being is discursively articulated as itself—i.e., as what it is—it is simultaneously distinguished from all other beings, differentiated from whatever it is not. At the same time, logos unifies all differentiated and articulated beings into a common, universal discourse—in this sense, it is the unifying structure of being1 as presence, which as such has no “other” to differ from and is therefore “in-different.” As Parmenides’ goddess shows in fragment B 4, absence in the sense of not-being-there and presence in the sense of being-there make sense as modifications of thereness as such; particular instances of presence or absence are mere particular modifications of being1 as pure presence, intelligible thereness. Presence as such is the absolute unifying context without an outside, a unity beyond differences. It is the belonging together of all relative articulations and oppositions within an identity that differs from nothing.However, when the limits established in the first inception are breached after the completion of metaphysics, the simple unity of presence no longer holds this self-evident privilege. What now emerges is precisely the previously disregarded other of being1 as presence, i.e., the background context of nonpresence (being2) that releases presence into the foreground of immediate accessibility by itself withdrawing. Unity as a feature of the self-identical present is incorporated into a wider belonging together, into the interplay of the background dimensions that let the present be meaningfully present. In other words, the “most extraordinary decision” (Entscheidung) underlying the initial primacy of presence—Parmenides’ krisis, the cutting-off and exclusion of any “There is not” from the pure “There is” (being1)—is now laid bare. Within a temporal framework, presence—the present—is no longer pure and simple self-sufficient self-identity, but rather becomes a situational and instantaneous, and thus singular and historically contextual, event of “presencing” (being3) of which the present is only one aspect, inseparably folded back into its background (being2).