But just as Sein und Zeit represented "one way" back to an authentic thinking on being, so the re-study of the pre-Socratics can also represent a recalling re-thinking (Andenken) on being. In Parmenides and Heraclitus, according to Heidegger, we find a way of thinking which remembers to think on being, as contrasted with the thinking which has tended to forget being. Thus this re-calling return to the way in which the great pre-Socratic thinkers authentically thought on being is not done in order to revivify these thinkers in some new and artificial form; rather it constitutes a return to that area where metaphysics obtained and still retains its origins, even though after the concealed fashion of the forgetting of being. Neither does Heidegger return to the ancient Greek thinkers or insist that they still have authority or something to say to us simply because they are old. Heidegger is no mere antiquarian. Nor is he interested in promoting some sort of renaissance in pre-Socratic thinking. Any such attempt, he maintains, would be vain and absurd.

Heidegger does not return again and again to the thinking of the pre-Socratics simply because of his insistence that their thought still supports our world, even though through the general forgetting of being in the West we have lost awareness of this. Even more than this, we return to the origins of this our western tradition of philosophy in order to rebuild anew, to build in an authentically historical manner upom the basis of these origins. In other words, Heidegger's re-study of the pre-Socratic origins of western thinking is meant to be historical in the full Heidegerrean sense of the word, namely, creative for the future possibilities of Dasein.

¶ 7:14 PM