However, one sees that the tragic flaw which was later to manifest itself in an almost total forgetting of being was already there in germ in the thinking of the great pre-Socratics. There was the ambiguity of the "twofold," the presencing of the present, which later turned into simply "the present"; and there was the factor of inevitable translation, as the attempt was made to put being over into truth, instead of thinking being from out of its truth as "unconcealedness." The Greeks, as Heidegger says, experienced this forgetting of being as the fate of concealedness.

Being's misfortune was there in germ form from the very beginning. And this fact leads to the next question: first of all, the meaning of being for the Greeks, for here the tragic flaw of the ambiguous "twofold" would seem to lie; next, how the great beginning among the pre-Socratics came to be falsified, how it came to work itself out in the thought of Plato and Aristotle; finally, how the "why" of the dead end, the consummation of this metaphysical tradition in Hegel and in Nietzsche is to be understood.

¶ 6:01 PM