EREIGNIS

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===== CAPOBIANCO (SER) –  PINDAR'S WORDS PERIOSION ALLON =====
In Heidegger's Way of Being, two chapters are devoted to his brilliantly creative readings of Heraclitus's fragments in the lecture courses in 1943 and 1944, which were collected in GA 55, published in 1979, and only recently translated into English. In the chapter titled "Sentinels of Being," I made note of his reading of kosmos, but here I would like to develop his line of thinking more completely and draw out the implications more fully.

Yet to accomplish this, we must take a step back to a lecture course on the saying of Anaximander that he had prepared in 1942 but did Not deliver. The text of the lecture course Was recently published as GA 78, and the reading that he unfolds is as compelling as the readings of Parmenides and Heraclitus that he undertook in this same extraordinarily creative period of the early 1940s. In this lecture course text, he also engaged in a lengthy discursus on several lines from Pindar's Isthmian Ode 5, and his commentary is especially important for our purposes. To crystallize his elucidation: After carefully laying out the ancient Greek experience of Being as temporal shining forth, he turns to the opening lines (verses 1-18) of Pindar's Ode. Heidegger is especially concerned with the first three lines, which in English translation are usually rendered:


Mother of the Sun, Theia of many names,
Because of you men value gold (chryson) as mighty
above all other things (periosion allon)

He focuses on Pindar's words periosion allon, and he notes that these words are said in relation to “gold" (chryson, 67). His effort is to clarify this relation.

He observes that periosion is the Ionian form of the word periousios (60), and this tells us that Pindar's word speaks to peri and ousia — the “around" (peri) “what-comes-to-presence" (ousia). For Heidegger, periosion allon in this line speaks not simply to what shines forth (beings and beings as a whole) but moreover to the shining or gleaming or glowing that allows everything (allon) to shine forth in the first place. What is principally brought into view is the unique radiance or gleam (Glanz, glänzen) that allows every particular being, as well as the whole ensemble of beings, to shine forth in the first place. How, then, is this unique primordial gleam named by Pindar? The word in the Ode is “gold," which is esteemed by human beings above “everything" else. Thus, as Heidegger reads the lines, Pindar had caught sight of and composed a hymn to that which allows all beings to be — and this is Being itself. Pindar glimpsed the very essencing of Being as “gold," as that which “gleams about or around" (umglänzt) all beings. The originary Greek experience of Being was brought to language in this poetizing: “Pindar's song thinks Being in the name of gold" (94). Being is named in the Greek word einai, Heidegger tells us, and Pindar's word “gold" is precisely “this illuminating and illuminating-about-and-around illumination (that) gives us the hint into einai" (295). The human being “glimpses" Being itself as “gold," but he warns that this must not be construed in a manner that would bring Being under the yoke of the human being. The "lighting-clearing itself" is not the human being:

From out of this essence of the human being we first experience wherein the Greek of the "Greek human being" lies. "The Greek human being" does not provide the measure for the understanding of "Being," but rather it is the manner in which "Being" is cleared as einai that determines the essence of the human being. The lighting-clearing itself (die Lichtung selbst) calls to the human being in the dispensation of its essence.