But although in the very beginning of western thought being was de-finite--in Parmenides, for example, it was thought as definately not nothing--it was a definite which emcompassed all things. As Heidegger says, "The Greeks name things as such within the whole as Physis." And this meant that for the Greeks the presence of the presencing alone was being.

And it is exactly at this point, where the ambiguity of the "twofold" (the presencing of the present) firs comes to light; it is here that the tragic flaw in western thinking on being lies, right in the very beginning of philosophy. For it is this ambiguity which gave an opening to the course which metaphysics has taken in western thought. And it is this which has governed the destiny of being as a forgetting of being. As Heidegger has said, metaphysics says that it is interested in being, but it is rather things that it takes, or rather mis-takes, for being. This has been the tragedy of occidental thought. And the most tragic thing about it is that it was inevitable (notwendig). In the very beginning of western thought philosphers failed to ask the authentic question concerning being (Seinsfrage). The question was, indeed, broached by the greatest thinkers among the great Greeks; howeer, their answer was always with reference to the presencing of the present (Anwesen des Anwesenden), and the ambiguity contained in this "twofold," the tragic flaw contained in this failure to make what Heidegger calls the "ontological difference" was to haunt western thought concerning the tiny word "is" from Parmenides' famous maxim to the "is" of Hegel's speculative propositions. Such has been the total fate of being.

¶ 6:36 PM