Heidegger’s Parmenides 89

Heidegger’s Parmenides: Greek

Modernity and the Classical Legacy
William V. Spanos

Abstract

One of Heidegger’s most insistent assertions about the identity of modern

Europe is that its origins are not Greek, as has been assumed in discourses of
Western modernity since the Englightenment, but Roman, the epochal conse-
quence of the Roman reduction of the classical Greek understanding of truth,
as a-letheia (un-concealment), to veritas (the correspondence of mind and
thing). In the Parmenides lectures of 1942–43, Heidegger amplifies this
genealogy of European identity by showing that this Roman concept of truth—
and thus the very idea of Europe—is also indissolubly imperial. Heidegger’s
genealogy has been virtually neglected by Western historical scholarship,
including classical. Even though restricted to the generalized site of language,
this genealogy is persuasive and bears significantly on the conflicted national
identity of modern, post-Ottoman Greece. It suggests that the obsessive pursuit
of the unitary cultural ideals of the European Enlightenment, in the name of
this movement’s assumed origins in classical Greece, constitutes a misguided
effort to accommodate Greek identity to the polyvalent, imperial, Roman model
of the polity that informs European colonial practice. Put positively, Heidegger’s
genealogy suggests a radically different way of dealing with the question of
Greek national identity, one more consonant with the actual philosophical,
cultural, ethnic, and political heterogeneity of ancient Greece (what Martin
Bernal has called the “Ancient Model”) and, thus, one less susceptible to
colonization by “Europe.”

The Greek pseudos, by being translated into the

Latin falsum, is transported into the Roman-
imperial domain of bringing to a downfall. Pseudos,
dissembling and concealing, now becomes what
fells, the false. Thus it is clear that Roman experi-
ence and thinking, organizing and expanding
[. . .] never moved within the region of aletheia
and pseudos. As a kind of historiographical contes-
tation, it has been known for a long time now
that the Romans took over from the Greeks many

Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 19, 2001.

89
90 William V. Spanos

ways and that this appropriation was also a recast-

ing. One day we must consider in what regions of
essence and out of what background this Roman-
izing of Greece came to pass.
—Martin Heidegger, Parmenides (1992:41–42)

Throughout his entire life, Martin Heidegger was profoundly attracted

to ancient Greece. This would seem to place him within the context of
the well-known Philhellenic initiative that began with the European
Enlightenment in France and England and reached its fullest articula-
tion in Germany, with the revival of classical studies in philology, literary
criticism, and philosophy. But, to see Heidegger’s abiding interest in
Greece within the framework of what is now a banal tradition, as so
many commentators of Heidegger have, is a serious mistake. His
relationship to the Greek topos and culture was not historicist—a
nostalgia for a once vibrant geographical space inhabited by a historical
people. It was genealogical, a matter of a language, history, culture, and
practice of political life that resonated with the conditions of the
contemporary “European” occasion. Indeed, as I will suggest, Heidegger’s
life-long meditation on the meaning of Greek antiquity was not a
continuation of the Enlightenment tradition; it was, in fact, an effort to
position Greek antiquity against the grain of the Enlightenment’s
representation of it as the origin of the idea of Europe. And, although
he had, as far as I know, little to say about modern Greece as such, his
interrogation of this Enlightenment interpretation of classical Greece
provides provocative directives, not only for contemporary intellectuals
engaged in debates over the “identity” of ancient Greeks, but for
contemporary Greeks as well. These people are, like it or not, compelled
by recent global events—not least the economic and linguistic Ameri-
canization of the planet in the wake of the Cold War and the establish-
ment of the European Union—to decide whether to become “Euro-
pean” or not, which in effect means becoming either a neocolonial
appendage of Euro-America or a truly postcolonial polity.
By way of shedding light on these anti-Enlightenment “Heideg-
gerian” directives, it might be useful to invoke the controversial thesis of
Martin Bernal’s book Black Athena (1987), which claims that the ac-
cepted scholarly and popular assumption about the identity of ancient
Greeks was an invention of the German Enlightenment and was
intended to endow Caucasian Europe’s emergent global aspirations with
historical legitimacy. As Bernal puts it, “For 18th- and 19th-century
Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable for Greece, which was
seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood,
to have been the result of the mixture of native Europeans and
 Heidegger’s Parmenides 91

colonizing Africans and Semitics” (Bernal 1987:2). The “Aryan Model,”

according to Bernal, thus had to “overthrow” the “Ancient Model,” “the
conventional view of the Greeks in the Classical and Hellenistic ages
[according to which] Greek culture had arisen as the result of coloniza-
tion, around 1500 BC, by Egyptians and Phoenicians who had civilized
the native inhabitants” (Bernal 1987:10).
There is a kernel of truth in Bernal’s symptomatic claim, one
which, as I will suggest, affiliates his insights about classical Greek
culture with Heidegger’s, despite their quite different disciplinary
registers. The evidence he brings to bear on the origins and character of
ancient Greek culture through his reading of original texts of that
period as well as those following its decline make it clear that it was, in
fact, a hybrid culture, i.e., multicultural. Certainly ancient Greece was
not as racially pure as Western historiography under the aegis of the
Aryan Model has assumed, and several recent classical scholars, despite
their qualifications, continue to argue. But I also think the truth of
Bernal’s argument, and its heuristic value for the contemporary occa-
sion, is limited due to Bernal’s overdetermination of the race issue. His
tendency to articulate the question of the origins of classical Greek
culture in terms of a racial binary—the Hellenic and Semitic—reduces
his valuable insight into the heterogeneous character of classical Greek
civilization and its complex history of representation to a disabling
identitarian framework that reinscribes the very problematic he exposes
in his interrogation of the Enlightenment’s Aryan Model. Furthermore,
this framework has also determined the parameters of the debate that
has followed Bernal: not only the arguments of the scholars (mostly
postcolonialist) who find his thesis enabling, but also those humanist
classical scholars like Mary Lefkowitz, who vehemently disagree with
Bernal’s conclusions (Lefkowitz 1996; Lefkowitz and Rogers 1996).
Indeed, it determines the scholarship of even those postmodernist
scholars, like Vassilis Lambropoulos (1993), who are strongly critical of
the humanist tradition of classical scholarship that has reduced the
political essence of ancient Greek culture to an aesthetic category
(Lambropoulos 1993).
What is tellingly overlooked in Bernal’s race-oriented revisionary
history of the origins of modern Western civilization—and in those
histories, pro and con, that his history has instigated—is precisely what
Heidegger, working on a different (philosophical) register, makes
absolutely central in his “de-struction” of the European (“ontotheo-
logical”) tradition: the role that Rome—or, rather, the Roman reinter-
pretation of classical Greek philosophy, culture, and politics—has played
in the codification of Europe’s cultural identity. It is an oversight, I
suggest, of enormous and disabling consequence. Bernal’s identitarian
92 William V. Spanos

historiography fails to interrogate the accepted idea of cultural continu-

ity between Greece and Rome (as in the ubiquitous cliche, “Greco-
Roman civilization”), precisely because it fails to entertain the possibility
that they were, in fact, radically different cultures. One is a culture
oriented by the principle of difference, the other, by the principle of
identity; one is committed to an agonistic polis, the other (even in its
republican phase), to an imperial state. These are the differences
Heidegger discloses by way of his destructive genealogy of the Western
tradition.

The Roman provenance of European modernity: truth and pedagogy

Contrary to virtually all modern accounts of the provenance of the West,
Heidegger claims that the idea of Europe, as we have come to know it
through Winckelmann, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Humboldt, Arnold, and
so on, was inaugurated, not by the classical Greeks, but by the Romans.
The conventional history of the Western symbolic order—its thought,
languages, representation of the polis, and global politics—does not
have its provenance in the existential actualities of the Greek experi-
ence, but in the Roman re-presentation of them. Specifically, its prov-
enance is “unstable” (but profoundly creative) Greek culture filtered
through the eyes of a metropolitan Roman culture that saw itself not as
the heir of Greek civilization, but as an imperial culture that would
“correct” the “fatal flaws” of its errant predecessor.1 This history of
rectification, according to Heidegger, begins with the Roman’s transfor-
mation of the destabilizing Greek understanding of truth as a-letheia
(“unconcealment” or “un-forgetting”) into veritas (“the adequation of
mind and thing”)(Heidegger 1993:116–120). This was an epochal
transformation that reduced an uncentered and originative, or open-
ended (“errant”), thinking to a centered and derivative, or end-oriented,
one. That is to say, it was a transformation that reduced an existential
mode of inquiry characterized by dialogic strife (polemos)—Auseinander-
setzung 2—to a calculative, teleological method committed in advance to
correctness and certainty (Heidegger 1959). In short, whereas the
Greeks, not only the Pre-Socratics (Heraclitus, Anaximander, Par-
menides), but even Plato and Aristotle (Heidegger 1962:2), thought the
be-ing (the temporal differentiations) of being as beings-in-the world,
the Romans, committed to the imperative of the adequaetio, thought the
anxiety-provoking differential dynamics of being metaphysically: from
the distanced vantage point of the end (meta ta physika). In this way, they
were able to reduce temporality and the differences that temporality
always disseminates to a totalized, spatial, or reified image that could be
“comprehended” (from the Latin, prehendere, “to take hold of”); that is,
 Heidegger’s Parmenides 93

to see and master the be-ing of being in its totality at any given immediate
moment in time (the volatile realm of “appearances”). This Roman
reduction of the temporality of being to a spatial/reified form, which
also posits Identity (the Whole, the One) as the condition for the
possibility of difference (the partial, the many), according to Heidegger,
constitutes the founding moment of the cultural identity of the Occi-
dent. What must be underscored is that this Roman mode of inquiry,
insofar as it produces knowledge meta ta physika, is informed by the will
to power over the be-ing of being, that is, over alterity. It is in this sense
that the Roman reduction of the Greek’s a-letheia to veritas is imperial in
essence.
Nonetheless, we must not restrict Heidegger’s insight into this
founding moment of European identity to the site of philosophy, i.e.,
ontological representation. Though Heidegger obviously overdetermined
this site in his thinking (and erred catastrophically when he did venture
into politics), his discourse makes it clear that, despite the abstractness
of his articulations, he understood being as an indissoluble continuum
that, besides ontology as such, included epistemology (the subject),
ecology, knowledge and cultural production, gender, race, and (na-
tional and international) politics. Thus, for example, his crucial distinc-
tion between Greek and Roman thinking finds a necessary analogy at
the site of education, which is to say, knowledge production. In an
unreasonably neglected passage of his famous essay, “Letter on Human-
ism,” Heidegger writes:

Humanitas, explicitly so called, was first considered and striven for in the
age of the Roman Republic. Homo Humanus was opposed to homo barbarus.
Homo humanus here means the Romans, who exalted and honored Roman
virtus through the “embodiment” of the paideia taken over from the
Greeks. These were the Greeks of the Hellenistic age, whose culture was
acquired in the schools of philosophy. It was concerned with eruditio et
institutio in bonas artes [scholarship and training in good conduct]. Paideia
thus understood was translated as humanitas. The genuine romanitas of
homo romanus consisted in such humanitas. We encounter the first human-
ism in Rome: it therefore remains in essence a specifically Roman
phenomenon, which emerged from the encounter of Roman civilization
with the culture of late Greek civilization. (Heidegger 1993:224)

Like thinking, Heidegger implies that the Greek paideia was, in

some fundamental degree, “errant”—a matter of prioritizing the par-
ticular over the whole (what the humanist tradition came to conclusively
identify as the [merely] “apparent” over the “real”)—not in the sense of
a binary opposition between them, but of a belongingness, the imperative
of which was antagonistic dialogue (Auseinandersetzung) (Heidegger
94 William V. Spanos

1959:62,105–106). If inquiry into the phenomena was never presupposi-

tionless for the Greeks, the presuppositions they brought to bear were
put at risk, that is, understood as “forestructures” subject to the destruc-
tive resistance of the singularity of events (Heidegger 1962:188–92).
(This is what Heidegger means by the “hermeneutical circle” of the
existential analytic, which he opposes to the “vicious circularity” that lies
hidden behind the “objectivity” or “disinterestedness”—the prejudice
against “presuppositions”—of modern humanistic and scientific inquiry
[Heidegger 1962:315,363–364].) Fearing its destabilizing consequences,
the Romans reduced this kind of radically dialogic—and peripatetic—
education to a technological/disciplinary pedagogy: one, in other
words, that transformed a way of learning committed to the instigation
of questioning into one that would guarantee the production of
dependable citizens of the metropolis. To invoke Foucault’s biopolitical
extension of the meaning of Heidegger’s notion of the “disposable
reserve” (Bestand), to which the modern (humanistic) “age of the world
picture” threatens to reduce human beings, this “correction” of the
“errant” Greek paideia was deployed to produce “useful and docile
bodies” at the service of empire (Heidegger 1997; Foucault 1977:135–
69): “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori ”(Horace Odes 3.2).
That the Roman empire, according to Heidegger, is at stake in this
reduction of the Greek paideia to eruditio et institutio in bonas artes is made
clear, not only by Heidegger’s assignment of the origins of the perennial
Western binary opposition between homo humanus and homo barbarus to
Rome, an assignment that implies that the Romans (rightly) read the
Greek comportment towards the “barbaros ”—“the one who does not
speak Greek”—as other than colonialist.3 It is also implicit in his
assertion that the end of Roman pedagogy is the “embodiment” of virtu
(from vir, “man”). For, in suggesting that virtu is the biologistic essence
of homo romanus (the antithesis of homo barbarus), he is also suggesting
that the relay of positive qualities inhering in this honored Latin word—
”man as animal rationale ” (the Roman translation of zoon logon echon),
“manliness,” “power deriving from piety and obedience to a higher
cause,” and “goodness”—were understood by the Romans as the binary
opposites of the effects of the Greek paideia: man as ec-static/in-sistent
being-in-the world, effeminateness, errancy, and irresponsibility, if not
exactly barbarism. This anthropo-logical and imperialist reading is
consonant with the common Roman attitude towards Greek learning
(especially philosophy). “In an effort to turn his son against Greek
culture,” Plutarch says of Cato the Elder, this Roman sage “allowed
himself an utterance which was absurdly rash for an old man: he
pronounced with all the solemnity of a prophet that if ever the Romans
 Heidegger’s Parmenides 95

became infected with the literature of Greece, they would lose their
empire” (Plutarch 1965:146).
To reiterate, the history to which Heidegger is referring here—
indeed, everywhere in his destructive readings of the ontotheological
tradition—is not historicist, but, like Nietzsche’s history of modern
morals (and Foucault’s history of modern penology), genealogical; that
is, a history of the present occasion. Heidegger underscores this
counter-mnemonic point by going on to implicate the entire history of
Europe—from the Medieval era through the Renaissance to the Enlight-
enment or humanist period (the period, we should recall, that bore
witness to the emergence of European Philhellenism)—with this Roman
obliteration by colonization of the de-centered, originative, and radi-
cally dialogic Greek culture in keeping with Rome’s polyvalent human-
ist/“imperial” project:
The so-called Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth-centuries in Italy
is a renascentia romanitatis. Because romanitas is what matters, it is concerned
with humanitas and therefore with Greek paideia. But Greek civilization is
always seen in its later form and this itself is seen from a Roman point of
view. The homo romanus of the Renaissance also stands in opposition to
homo barbarus. But now the in-humane is the supposed barbarism of gothic
Scholasticism in the Middle Ages. Therefore a studium humanitatis, which
in a certain way reaches back to the ancients and thus becomes a revival of
Greek civilization, always adheres to historically understood humanism.
For Germans this is apparent in the humanism of the eighteenth century
supported by Winckelmann, Goethe, and Schiller. On the other hand,
Hölderlin does not belong to “humanism,” precisely because he thought
the destiny of man’s essence in a more original [i.e., Greek] way than
“humanism” could.” (Heidegger 1993:125)

What needs to be underscored in this remarkably suggestive, if tantaliz-

ingly brief, history is that Heidegger identifies Winckelmann, Goethe,
and Schiller—and by implication the entire body of Enlightenment
German scholarship: Woolf, Schlegel, Herder, Hegel, Humboldt—as
those responsible for the revival and institutionalization of classical
Greek studies in modernity with the anthropo-logical Roman para-
digm. This humanistic frame of reference (what Bernal calls “the
Aryan model”) is that which has determined the interpretation of
classical Greek culture ever since. The names to which this scholarship
refers—Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Plato,
Aristotle—are Greek, but, Heidegger implies, they are Greeks medi-
ated through imperial Roman eyes. This will become tellingly clear if,
for example, the circular destinarian structure of Virgil’s Aeneid (and
the enormous popularity of this Latin epic in European history before
96 William V. Spanos

the advent of the “Aryan model”) is recognized to be, as it should, the

Roman “visionary’s” “correction” of the “adolescent” errancy of “blind”
Homer’s Odyssey that was intended to justify the Roman imperium sine
fine.

Parmenides: the relation between the false (falsum) and imperialism

Though the question of who the ancient Greeks were is an abiding one
in Heidegger’s discourse at large, his articulation of the distinction
between Greek and Roman thinking, Greek and Roman paideia, the
Greek and Roman understanding of the polis, and the indissoluble
relationship between the two, is always subordinated to the larger
question of being (die Seinsfrage). As a result of this emphasis on
ontology—and a certain fatal antipathy for the political—both his
sympathetic and critical commentators, following his overdetermination
of the bios theoretikos, have almost entirely overlooked the enabling role
this crucial distinction and its polyvalence play, however symptomati-
cally, in his effort to think the essence of the planetary triumph of
technology, what Heidegger elsewhere calls “Americanism” (Heidegger
1997:153), in modernity. The most serious consequence of this failure to
adhere to one of Heidegger’s major contributions to postmodern
interpretive practice—the imperative to think what a text leaves unsaid
(the margins)—has been the unfortunate neglect of the Parmenides, the
lecture course on this enigmatic inaugural Greek thinker that Heidegger
gave at Freiburg University in the winter semester 1942–43. This text,
not published until 1988 (English translation 1992), constituted, accord-
ing to the French philosopher Éliane Escoubas (one of the few who
recognized its importance in Heidegger’s oeuvre), the “texte-charniére” of
Heidegger’s “explication avec ” (his “reciprocal rejoinder to”) German
National Socialism (Escoubas 1988:173–88).
I cannot in this brief space do justice to Heidegger’s remarkably
suggestive, but neglected, meditation on this pre-Socratic philosopher’s
thought concerning the question of being and its relationship to the
idea of the polis. For the purpose of demonstrating its relevance for the
present age, particularly for the contemporary Greek occasion, I restrict
my commentary to that resonant moment in his text that discloses the
essential complicity of the truth discourse of the modern West with
imperial power and traces that complicity back to the Romans’ “transla-
tion” of the Greek a-letheia to veritas, or, more accurately, the Greek
pseudos to falsum. By “the present age,” it is important to emphasize, I
mean what Heidegger elsewhere calls “the Age of the World Picture” to
suggest the essentially imperial character of thinking at the “end” of the
Western philosophical tradition; that is, when the “benign” humanist
 Heidegger’s Parmenides 97

(i.e., metaphysical/spatial) logic inaugurated by the Romans fulfills—

and discloses—itself in the global triumph of technological or instru-
mental thinking and the reduction of being, in all its manifestations, to
a banalized disposable reserve. This, to bring Heidegger’s proleptic
insight up to date, is the age that the intellectual deputies of the
triumphant liberal capitalist democracy have, in the aftermath of the
Cold War, announced as “the end of history” and the advent of “the new
world order” (Fukuyama 1992; Haas 1997), the global order, not
incidentally, to which the modern Greek state, by way of the pressure of
the European Union (and NATO), is being compelled to accommodate
its polity and culture.
Heidegger’s revisionary interpretation of the essential relationship
between Western knowledge production and imperial power has its
point of departure in a genealogy of the concept of “truth” privileged by
Western modernity. (Significantly, it is this interpretation that antici-
pates Michel Foucault’s analysis of the “repressive hypothesis” of the
post-monarchical “reformers,” his demonstration that the truth dis-
course of post-Enlightenment modernity is not external to and the
adversary of power, but internal to and complicitous with power.)
We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative
terms: it “excludes,” it “represses,” it “censors,” it “abstracts,” it “masks,” it
“conceals.” In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces
domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge
that may be gained of him belong to this production. (Foucault 1977:194;
1978:17–49)

This is the truth discourse that was produced in the name of certainty by
the Romans, when, according to the imperatives of metaphysical think-
ing, they decisively split and hierarchized the earlier Greek understand-
ing of truth as a-letheia (“un-concealment”) into the true and the false
(veritas and falsum).
For the Greeks, the negative of a-letheia implied in the privative
prefix, pseudos (“dissembling”), belonged “positively” with the “positive”:
The essence of negativity is nothing negative, but neither is it something
“positive.” The distinction between the positive and the negative [uncon-
cealment and concealment] does not suffice to grasp what is essential [in
the Greek understanding of the truth] as a-letheia, to which the non-
essence belongs. The essence of the false [for the Greeks] is not something
“false.” (Heidegger 1992:44)

As the prefix of a-letheia suggests, unconcealment and concealment were

always already “related” in polemos (Auseinandersetzung). In their transla-
tion of a-letheia, the Romans, on the other hand, severed and hierarchized
98 William V. Spanos

this relatedness. They saw the negative—falsum—as the radically inferior

other of veritas, the correspondence of mind and thing. In so doing, they
reduced the unending antagonistic and productive relationship to a war
to the end, to a relationship, that is, which enabled the Romans to
demonize the radical other of truth and thus to justify its obliteration.
In the first phase of his inquiry into the relationship between
metaphysical perception and imperialism, Heidegger traces the origins
of this Roman falsum back to the Greek sphallo—“to overthrow, bring to
a downfall, fell, make totter”—which, according to the directive sug-
gested by the stem following the privative prefix of a-letheia—was not the
counter-essence of the latter for the Greeks. By demonstrating that the
Romans represented the ontological site as a domain or territory to be
mastered, Heidegger suggests that their bypassing of the Greek pseudos,
which is affiliated with lathos (concealment) or lethe (forgetting), was
intended to put the truth (of being) and its binary opposite, the false, at
the service not simply of certainty, but of the imperium:
The realm of essence decisive for the development of the Latin falsum is
the one of the imperium and the “imperial.” We will take these words in
their strict sense. . . . On the way through the French language [and here,
Heidegger, is referring to its Roman origins], “commend” [“to entrust to
protection and sheltering cover”] became commandieren, i.e., more pre-
cisely, the Latin imperare, im-parare = to arrange, to take measures, i.e., prae-
cipere, to occupy in advance, and so to take possession of the occupied
territory and to rule it. Imperium is the territory founded on command-
ments [Gebot], in which the others are obedient [botmäsig]. Imperium is the
command in the sense of commandment. Command, thus understood, is
the basis of the essence of domination, not the consequence of it and
certainly not just a way of exercising dominations. . . . In the essential realm
of the “command” belongs the Roman “law” ius. This word is connected
with jubeo: to enjoin [heissen] by injunction [Geheiss] to have something
done and to determine it through this doing and letting. The command is
the essential ground of domination and of iustum, as understood in Latin,
“to-be-in-the-right” and “to have a right.” Accordingly, iustitia has a wholly
different ground of essence than that of dike, which arises from aletheia.
(Heidegger 1992:40)

In this remarkably resonant passage, Heidegger points to the

affiliation between prae-cipere and words like “concept,” “conceive,”
“principle,” “precept,” “perception,” “capture,” (all from the Latin:
capere, “to seize”), whose etymologies reveal the process of knowledge
production as a reification and grasping or mastering of the be-ing of
being and with “metaphysics,” the perception of the temporality of
being from the end or from above, i.e., “in advance,” which spatializes
what it sees. It is an affiliation that reduces the Greek understanding of
 Heidegger’s Parmenides 99

being as radically temporal in essence (and the paedeia it calls for) into
a territory to be “occupied in advance” (my emphasis). It is no accident
that, since the Romans, the West has referred to the being into which
one inquires as a “region” (from the Latin “regere”: “to rule”) or
“domain” (from “domus/dominus”: house/master, or “province” (“vincere”:
to conquer) or “territory,” words referring to the production of knowl-
edge that are foreign to ancient Greek inquiry. Heidegger writes,
For the Romans, the earth, tellus, terra, is the dry land, the land as distinct
from the sea; this distinction differentiates that upon which construction,
settlement, and installation are possible from those places where they are
impossible. Terra becomes territorium, land of settlements as realm of
command. In the Roman terra can be heard an imperial accent, completely
foreign to the Greek gaia and ge.” (Heidegger 1992:60)

In keeping with this insight into the complicity of knowledge and

power, the second phase of Heidegger’s analysis invokes the visual
metaphorics informing and privileged by meta-physical inquiry in order
to demonstrate that the Roman concept of the false, as a fundamental
dimension of commanding, is related to over-seeing. It also suggests the
continuity between Heidegger’s ontological and Foucault’s political
genealogy of modern Western knowledge production, surveillance:
To commanding as the essential ground of domination belongs “being on
high” [or “above,” Obensein]. That is only possible through constant
surmounting of others [Überhohung], which are thus the inferiors [Unteren].
In this surmounting, in turn, there resides the constant ability to oversee
[super-vise and dominate, Übersehen-können]. We say “to oversee some-
thing,” which means “to dominate it” [beherrschen]. (Heidegger 1992:41)

This over-sight of an absolute subject, understood in Derrida’s terms as

a “Transcendental Signified,” or “center elsewhere” that is “beyond the
reach of [free] play” (Derrida 1978:279), is not, as it is understood in
ordinary discourse, a matter of the failure of seeing something that is
actually there. It is, rather, the proper form of vision. Seeing, as it is
understood in the Western tradition, is not passive reception of that
which it perceives. It is an action, a praxis: “To this commanding view,
which includes surmounting, belongs a constant being-on-the-lookout
(Auf-der-Lauer-liegen). That is the form of all action that oversees [domi-
nates from the gaze], but that keeps to itself: in Roman, the actio of the
actus” (Heidegger 1992:41). And it is this reifying oversight that, in
putting everything/time in its “proper” place within the grid of the
Whole, is an action which identifies it essentially with the imperial
project:
100 William V. Spanos

The commanding overseeing is the dominating vision which is expressed

in the often cited phrase of Caesar: veni, vedi, vici—I came, I oversaw
[übersah], I conquered. Victory is only the effect of the Caesarian gaze that
dominates [Übersehens] and the seeing whose proper character is actio. The
essence of the imperium resides in the actus of constant “action.” The
imperial actio of the constant surmounting of others includes the sense that
the others, should they rise to the same or even to a comparable level of
command, will be brought down—in Roman: fallere (participle: falsum).
This bringing-to fall [das Zu-Fall-bringen: “the occasioning of an ac-cident”
[from the Latin, cadere, “to fall or perish”] belongs necessarily to the
domain of the imperial. (Heidegger 1992:40)

After establishing the essential complicity of Roman metaphysics

and imperialism—the over-sight or sur-veillance, which is identical to
domination of the “Other” (and is foreign to Greek thought)—Heidegger
goes on to distinguish a primitive and implicitly wasteful and inefficient
(resistible) imperial practice from a fully articulated (“proper”) and
highly economical, efficient, and virtually invulnerable imperial prac-
tice. This distinction constitutes his most important contribution to
contemporary (postcolonial) analyses of imperialism and, I suggest, to a
rethinking of modern Greece’s relationship to Europe. It should not be
overlooked that the developed form of imperial practice to which he
points is not only informed by the metaphorics of panoptic vision, but by
the affiliated figure of the circle, i.e., the center and the periphery:
The bringing-to-fall can be accomplished in a “direct” assault [Ansturm]
and overthrowing [Niederwerfen, literally, “throwing down”]. But the other
can also be brought down by being outflanked [Umgehung] and “tripped
up” from behind. The bringing-to-fall is now the way of deceptive circum-
vention [Hinter –gehen]. . . Considered from the outside, going behind the
back is the roundabout and therefore mediate bringing-to-fall as opposed
to immediate overthrowing. Thereby, the fallen are not annihilated, but
are in a certain way raised up again—within the boundaries [in den
Grenzen] which is fixed by the dominators. (Heidegger 1992:41)

The distinction between these two forms of imperialism that

Heidegger traced back to the Roman revision of the Greek understand-
ing of truth—a distinction that would immunize Rome from the fate of
the Greek polity—can only be seen as proleptic of Michel Foucault’s
differentiation between power relations in the ancien regime and in the
Enlightenment and, more pertinently, to my argument of Edward Said’s
appropriation of Foucault’s distinction in his critique of Orientalism:
i.e., modern Western imperialism. More specifically, in thematizing the
textualization (mediation) of power in the appropriation of truth for
purposes of imperial domination, Heidegger anticipates Foucault’s and
Said’s disclosure of the complicity of the microcosmic table—the
 Heidegger’s Parmenides 101

structural model of knowledge production of the modern West—with

the colonization and pacification of the “Other:”
This “staking out” and “fixing”[Abstecken] is called in Roman pango, whence
the word pax—peace. This is, thought imperially, the fixed situation of the
fallen. In truth, the bringing-to-fall in the sense of deception [Hintergehens]
and roundabout action [Umgehens] is not the mediate and derived imperial
actio, but the truly genuine imperial actio. It is not in war, but in the fallere
of deceptive circumvention [hintergehenden Umgehens] and its pressing-into-
service for domination that the proper and “great” trait of the imperial
reveals itself. The battles against the Italian cities and tribes, by means of
which Rome secured its territory and expansion, makes manifest the
unmistakable procedure of roundabout action and encirclement through
treaties with tribes lying further out. In the Roman fallere —to bring-to-
fall—as a going around, there resides deceiving [Tauschen]; the falsum is
the insidiously deceptive: “the false.” (Heidegger 1992:41)4

The end of the pursuit of knowledge, according to this devel-

oped—“postcolonial”—form of imperial practice, is to produce peace.
But, this “peace” will be achieved only by the total colonization and
pacification of the “Other.” To put it in terms of Foucault’s “repressive
hypothesis”—a strategy that along with the appropriation of the “Roman
model” was invented by the Enlightenment “reformers” to escape the
fate of the ancien regime’s overt use of power—this duplicitous peace will
only come when those “others” upon whom power is practiced become,
by way of the inscription of the “truth” (of the West) in the “other,” the
bearers of their own incarceration:
He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes
responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontane-
ously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he
simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own
subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical
weight; it tends to the non-corporeal; and, the more it approaches this
limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a
perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always
decided in advance. (Foucault 1977:202–203)

In other words, theory, understood as a mode of inquiry that privileges

sight (theoria), and practice are coterminous. The Pax Metaphysica is the
Pax Romana. It is in this sense, according to Heidegger, that “the Latin
falsum [like the veritas, which is its binary opposite] is alien to the Greek
pseudos [and the a-letheia to which its belongs]” (Heidegger 1992:42).
Heidegger’s account of the Roman translation of ancient Greek’s
aletheia and pseudos to veritas and falsum should not, therefore, be seen as
simply an exercise in historical philology. Rather, it should be read as the
disclosure of an epochal event in the history of the West, an event that
102 William V. Spanos

laid the foundations on which the edifice of the collective identity of the
Occident has been built: its essential way of thinking and its vision of the
human polity. This is the point he makes at the end of his meditation on
the Roman translation of the Greek pseudos to falsum. Against the
prevailing post-Enlightenment (i.e., humanist) historiographical view
that posits classical Greece as the origin of European civilization—a view,
it should be remembered, that was held by those exiled Greek intellec-
tuals, like Korais, who were committed to constituting the identity of
post-Ottoman Greece after the War of Independence—Heidegger prof-
fers the view that the Romans’ “transformation of Hellenism” was not
limited to “individual institutions of the Greek world or to single
attitudes and ‘modes of expression’ of Greek humanity.” On the
contrary, this “Latinization” [of the Greek world] was a “transformation of
the essence of truth and Being within the essence of the Greco-Roman
domain of history” and thus “the genuine event of history” (1992:42). It
was, further, not Roman imperial practice that was the basis of the
essential transformation of aletheia into veritas, as rectitudo (correctness);
it was, rather, the transformation of the aletheia into veritas that gave rise
to imperialism. And it is this genealogy of the origins of the West, against
the prevailing Enlightenment representation, that we now must retrieve
if we are to gain a truer understanding of the essence of ancient Greece
and of modernity, by which Heidegger means both their thought and
their politics:
That is why the historical state of the world we call the modern age,
following historiographical chronology, is also founded on the event of the
Romanizing of Greece. The “Renaissance” of the ancient world accompa-
nying the outset of the modern period is unequivocal proof of this. A more
remote, but by no means indifferent, consequence of the Romanizing of
Greece and of the Roman rebirth of antiquity is the fact that we today [and
this “we,” I would add emphatically, includes contemporary Greeks] still
see the Greek world with Roman eyes—and indeed not solely within
historiographical research into ancient Greece but also, and this is the only
decisive thing, within the historical metaphysical dialogue of the modern
world with that of the ancients. . . . [W]e still think the Greek polis and the
“political” in a totally un-Greek fashion. We think the “political” as
Romans, i.e. imperially. The essence of the Greek polis will never be
grasped within the horizon of the political as understood in the Roman
way. As soon as we consider the simple unavoidable essential domains,
which are for the historiographer naturally of no consequence, since they
are inconspicuous and noiseless, then, but only then, do we see that our
usual basic ideas, i.e., Roman, Christian, modern ones [those of the onto-
theo-logical tradition], miserably fail to grasp the primordial essence of
ancient Greece. (Heidegger 1992:42–43)
 Heidegger’s Parmenides 103

Parmenides: directives for thinking Greek modernity

What, then, does Heidegger’s destruction of the post-Enlightenment’s
interpretation of the relationship between Greek antiquity and Euro-
pean modernity provide for understanding anew and rethinking the
contemporary Greek occasion? The post–Cold War occasion (including
the United State’s “humanitarian wars” against Iraq and Serbia) has
borne witness to the global “triumph” and “peace” and “justice” of
liberal capitalist democracy (and its discursive medium, American
English)—a democracy, peace, and justice that attributes its historical
origins to Greek antiquity—and on the European continent has mani-
fested itself in the form of the inclusive “visionary” authority of NATO
and the European Community.
To begin with, Heidegger’s counter-mnemonic reading of this
history compels not only a rethinking of the representation of the idea
of Europe handed down to us by the Enlightenment. It also, more
specifically, demands that we rethink this representation as it has
impinged on the establishment of modern Greece as a nation-state at
the turn of the nineteenth century and on the subsequent history of this
linguistically, culturally, politically, and geographically ambiguous “Euro-
pean” nation. This relationship is, of course, a very complex and
contested matter, one exacerbated by the seemingly irreconcilable
claims that have historically been made by the Christian/Roman Byzan-
tine tradition (epitomized by the popular epithet of Greek identity
Romios/Romiosini), the Classical Greek tradition, and the late Hellenistic
(Macedonian) tradition, not to say the Ottoman tradition itself, on the
psyche of the diverse indigenous population of post-Revolutionary
Greece. Yet, I do not profess adequate scholarly expertise to speak with
authority about it. My justification in intervening in the debate derives
from the estranging effect—the shock value—incumbent on its forceful
dislocation out of the sedimented and unproductive discursive context
in which it has been imbedded (mired, I would say) since the rise of
German classical scholarship (Altertumswissenschaft) at the end of the
eighteenth century and its reconstellation into the general cultural
history of Europe which Heidegger thematizes, especially in his Parmenides
lectures.
Such a reconstellation, as I have shown, suggests that the hege-
monic Enlightenment historiography on which European modernity
has based its claim to its classical Greek origins was not Greek at all, but
“Roman”—and essentially imperial—insofar as it thought being in all its
manifestations “in advance” (meta-ta-physika) rather than, like the an-
cient Greeks, existentially or originatively. In other words, Heidegger’s
reading of this history, though it makes no reference to modern Greece,
104 William V. Spanos

suggests nevertheless that the Enlightenment nations’ interpretation of

classical Greek thought and culture—Britain’s, France’s, and Germany’s—
and their vocal “Philhellenism”—their “sympathy” for the Greek revolu-
tion against what they represented as the Ottoman imperial “despo-
tism”—was, whatever the particular political orientation of each towards
the emergent nation, ultimately an ideologically motivated invention—
an “imagined community” in Benedict Anderson’s apt phrase. They
invoked modern Europe’s filial relationship with classical Greece—
Hegel, for example, makes this eminently clear in his Philosophy of History
(1956)—for the purpose of constructing or, rather, reconstructing and
empowering a European identity that was antithetical to the “despotic”
and “decadent” cultures of the Orient, the Eastern Mediterranean,
India, China, and especially the Ottoman Empire, and to the “barbar-
ian” or “prehistoric” cultures of Africa and the “New World.” (We must
resist the disciplinary perspective inscribed in our consciousness by the
Enlightenment’s rigorous compartmentalization and classification of
knowledge that blinds us to the indissoluble relationship between
Europe’s invention of modern Greece and the rapacity of France’s and
England’s colonial projects in Africa, and the Near and Far East at that
time.)
Intent on recuperating or producing a continuous European
tradition in the face of the crisis of identity precipitated by the globaliza-
tion of their emergent imperial projects, the European nations, whether
in their capacity as individual states or as members of a collective
Europe, were indifferent, if not blind to, the ethnic, cultural, religious,
and political realities of Greek society at the beginning of the nineteenth
century. Inscribed by their panoptic orientation towards history, the
“enlightened” European nations (over)saw their “Philhellenism” in a
way remarkably similar to the way, according to Heidegger, the Romans
(over)saw their colonial project. They re-presented the newly “liber-
ated”—but from the perspective of their binarist logic, hopelessly
“benighted” and “underdeveloped,” i.e., peripheral—Greek nation, which
was emerging from the yoke of imperial Ottoman rule, as a “free nation”
taking its “rightful place” within the family of free European nations, the
better to harness its strategic geopolitical location to an emergent “humane,” i.e.,
neo-colonial Europe. I mean an Enlightenment Europe that, analogous to
its synchronous metamorphosis from a monarchical to a liberal capital-
ist, bourgeois polity (what Foucault has called the disciplinary society)
under the aegis of “the Roman reference,”5 was in the process of
transforming an older, overtly violent—and thus politically vulnerable —
form of imperialism into a kind of imperialism that would render its
metropolitan center—its exploitative colonialist motives—invisible, a
“center elsewhere,” “beyond the reach of [the] free play [of criticism]”
 Heidegger’s Parmenides 105

into a “progressive” humanist/technological discursive practice whose

origin, though Roman, allegedly lay in the “benign” and “enlightened”
democracy of the classical Greek polis.
Following the directives of Heidegger’s Parmenides, we can say that
for all practical purposes—and despite its heterogeneous and conflicted
cultural identity—the Greece imagined as a nation-state by European
“Philhellenism” in the wake of the Revolution of 1821, after 400 years of
Ottoman rule, was, in reality, as its imposition of a patronizing German-
born king testifies, a Greece whose cultural and political identity was not
Greek and democratic, but essentially Roman and imperial. This is
borne witness to, not only by the European Philhellenes, theoreticians
like the Schlegels, Schiller, Humboldt, and Hegel, by treasure hunters
like Lord Elgin, C. R. Cockerell, Louis-Sebastièn Fauvel, Baron Haller
von Hallerstein, and Baron Otto Magnus von Stackeberg, and by travel
writers like Chateaubriand, Abbé Barthelemy, and Byron, but also by
many ventriloquized Greek intellectual exiles who from abroad were
imagining the cultural, social, and political structure of the future Greek
nation. I am, of course, referring to such Neo-hellenic thinkers as
Iosipos Moisiodax, Rhigas Pheraios-Velestinlis, and Adamantios Korais,
all of whom, despite their nomadic status and localization of the
speculative horizon of European Enlightenment thinking, were pro-
foundly influenced by the liberal discourses of such Enlightenment
thinkers (some of whom Heidegger identifies as essentially “Roman”) as
Condillac, Locke, Winckelmann, Schiller, Hegel, Herder, and Humboldt.
Ultimately, if not immediately, indifferent to the actual historical
realities of Ottoman Greece, the dream of these exilic Greek intellectu-
als was a Eurocentric dream precipitated, perhaps unwittingly, in the
purifying (dedifferentiating) alembic of European Orientalism (Gour-
gouris 1996:128–40) and in its vision of modernization—which meant in
the end the Europeanization—of the “unimproved”6 and recalcitrantly
centrifugal hybrid structure of the new society according to the Euro-
pean nationalist (imperial) model (sometimes accommodating and
sometimes resisting the tradition of Roman/Byzantine/Christian ortho-
doxy). However local and contemporary their rhetoric, the “Neohellen-
ism” of these thinkers was essentially nostalgic. Their pedagogical efforts
were thus oriented towards imposing a highly abstract, elitist language—
a not too pure katharevousa that was a combination of classical and
Byzantine Greek—and a nationalist culture and politics on a heteroge-
neous population that had spoken a highly “impure” (“unimproved”)
demotic Greek, had lived their lives outside the European orbit for
centuries, had referred to themselves as Romoii as much as Ellenii, and
were more attuned to Athanasios Diakos and the Bridge of Alammana
than to Leonidas and the Pass of Thermopolae.7 These linguistic,
106 William V. Spanos

cultural, and political purifications they hoped, along with their

Philhellenic masters, would re-weave the historical thread—cut once by
the Peloponnesian Wars (and the Macedonian conquest), by Roman
colonization, again by the advent of Roman/Byzantine Christianity, and
finally and most decisively by the Turkokratia—that bound ancient
Greece to modern Greece.8 Despite the genuineness of the European
nations’ Philhellenism, their interest in the nascent Greek nation-state
was informed by a fundamental Eurocentrism. It undoubtedly had less
to do with the amelioration of the Greek condition than with using the
War of Independence for purposes of reestablishing once and for all the
History-ordained primacy of Europe in relationship to the rest of the
world, that is, its metropolitan hegemony on a global scale sanctioned by
its own interpretation of the truth of Universal History. To put it
succinctly, the modern Greece fabricated by the Enlightenment’s gaze,
on the analogy of the latter’s monumentalist representation of classical
Greece, was in fact a “Romanized Greece.” It was a differential Greece
accommodated to a Europe that, despite its alleged classical Greek origins,
was in fact founded on and represented itself in terms of the Roman
model. This Greece, in short, was conceived to assure its status as a
satellite of Europe: a Europeanized Greece that was at the same time a
metaphysical Greece, a humanist Greece, a nationalist Greece, a racist
Greece, and, ultimately, as its astonishingly unfilial—and disastrous—
commitment to the Megali Idea (the “Great Idea”) makes clear, whatever
its proponents’ interpretation of its ends, an imperialist Greece. Like the
classical Greece invented by the Enlightenment custodians of the
European Cultural Memory, it was a phantasmic Greece that had
virtually obliterated the anxiety-provoking but also potentially productive “reality”
of an originally far more complex and diversified culture.
It is true, of course, that the historical realities—internal and
external to the Greek state—thwarted the immediate fulfillment in
cultural and political practice of this monumentalist Enlightenment
vision of a Europeanized, which is to say, Roman/humanist, Greece. But
not the ideal. However unnourished, that Roman ideal, masquerading in
the resonant names of Greek antiquity, was nevertheless planted in the
Greek national consciousness in the period of the Revolution. And since
then, as Vassilis Lambropoulos has shown so persuasively at the synec-
dochical site of modern Greek literature and literary criticism (though it
is the mask of European Romanticism, not that of European Romanism
he exposes) (Lambropoulos 1988),9 it has increasingly been at its
monumentalizing nationalist/imperial work, representing the polyva-
lent heterogeneity and plurality of Greek culture in the pejorative
binarist terms inaugurated by the Romans when they translated a-letheia
to veritas and reduced its positive potential to the European Identity.
 Heidegger’s Parmenides 107

This ambivalent heterogeneity, which was precluded by its willed

accommodation to the Enlightenment’s “Romanization” of classical and
modern Greece, is, I suggest, the second directive to the present age
instigated by Heidegger’s disclosure of the perennial complicity of
metaphysics and the politics of imperialism in the Parmenides. And it is a
directive especially pertinent to a ventriloquized Greek dominant culture
which, in the name of modernization (i.e., the release from the stigma of
“underdevelopment”) and against a small minority, is bent on accommo-
dating the Greek language, culture, economy, and public sphere to the
Americo-Eurocentric European Union. In his genealogy of European
modernity, Heidegger does not go beyond his claim that the classical
Greeks, as opposed to the Romans, did not think metaphysically or, to put
it positively, that they thought of being agonistically, according to the
imperatives of their radically temporal/historical comportment towards
being. If, however, we grant this meaning of the ancient Greek’s concept
of truth, a-letheia, if, that is, we reconstellate his ontological disclosure of
the always already openendedness—the unreifiability—of being at the
indissolubly related sites of classical Greek cultural production (poetry,
drama, history, travel writing, as well as philosophical discourse) and
political practice (the agonistic polis, according to Hannah Arendt’s
brilliant and persuasive but neglected account of the Greek public sphere
in The Human Condition [1958:192–207]), we encounter an “unwittingly
changed terrain” (Althusser 1979:23) in which the received metaphysical
assumption about the truths of these sites undergoes a startling estrange-
ment. What modern classical scholarship—and the political, so-called
liberal democratic institutions that have founded themselves on it—has
taken to be a unified and identitarian culture, a culture subsumed under
the name of a metropolitan “Greece” that distinguished itself in an
inaugural way from the barbarians at the periphery of its circumferential
frontiers,10 suddenly metamorphoses. Classical Greece becomes some-
thing resembling an “errant” multicultural society or, perhaps more
accurately, a culture the essence of which was its unending contestation of
the kind of hierarchical binaries—the One/Many, Identity/Difference,
Truth/Falsehood, Male/Female, White/Black, Culture/Anarchy, Civi-
lized Citizen/Barbarian, and so on—that were fundamental to the
Roman imperial project and, however hidden behind the seductive
rhetoric of modern democracy, continue to determine the thought,
culture, and politics of European/American modernity.
This, I submit, is, in varying degrees, of course, the decisive
testimony—if we disengage ourselves from the visualist, binarist, and identitarian
interpretive frame of reference inscribed in us by the Cultural Memory of
Romanized Enlightenment—of Odysseus’s errancy in Homer’s Odyssey
(which it was the Roman Virgil’s imperial project to “correct” in The
108 William V. Spanos

Aeneid); of the agonistic belongingness of Heraclitus’s Logos (“Polemos

and logos are the same”) (Heidegger 1962:62); of Parmenides’ conflictual
aletheia (and even of Plato’s pharmakon, and Aristotle’s katholon); of
Herodotus’s “philobarbarian” sympathies in The Histories; of the Erynes
(the finally acknowledged Angry Ones) in Aeschylus’ Oresteia; of the
resonantly provocative silence of Antigone bereaved of a language in the
name of language in Sophocles’ Antigone; of Iphigenia’s self -sacrifice in
Iphigenia at Aulis, which discloses the nationalist and imperial violence
hidden in Agamemnon’s (and the assembled Greek host’s) claim; of the
“barbarian” Media’s appalling murder of her children, which dislocates
Jason’s ethnocentric racism in Euripides, Media; and of the errancy of
the itinerant early Greek geographers that the Romanized Strabo
“corrects” in behalf of Augustus’s imperial project.11 To encounter these
and other Greek texts produced before the “Hellenization” of Hellas
(after the disastrous Peloponnesian Wars and its colonization by the
Romans) from outside the Enlightenment problematic enables us to see
what for those within the latter is necessarily invisible: that the ancient
Greeks, whatever the limitations of their social organization, understood
themselves not, like the Romans, as transcendental subjects, but as finite
beings, “in-sistent ex-sistents,” simultaneously and irremediably inside
and outside the be-ing of being. Acknowledging this finiteness as the
human condition, they, therefore, encountered being in all its manifes-
tations, from this outside-in or in-between, that is, from the ambivalent
perspective of a-partness, the imperative of which is not (as it is from the
metaphysical perspective that perceives Being and appearance as a
radical binary) mastery or even fabrication, but an unending and mobile
contestation—what Heidegger calls Auseinandersetzung, the belongingness
in strife of “opposites” that always already precipitates the extraordinary
in the ordinary, the difference (that makes a difference) in the same.

Heidegger’s Parmenides and Bernal’s Black Athena:

thinking the break between ancient and Modern Greece positively

Thus we come back, in the sense of a Heideggerian “repetition”

(Wiederholung), to Martin Bernal’s provocative retrieval of the “Ancient
Model” of Greek antiquity from the oblivion to which it was relegated by
the German Enlightenment’s invention of the racist “Aryan Model,”
more specifically to the question of this “Ancient Model’s” vague
content. By reconstellating Heidegger’s Parmenides into the context of
the debates precipitated by Bernal’s Black Athena, by, that is, introducing
the Roman factor which he, as well as the classical scholarship he is
contesting, inexplicably represses, we are enabled to perceive, not only
its limitations: its indifference to the ontological “ground” of classical
 Heidegger’s Parmenides 109

Greek thinking and, above all, its blindness to the imperialist dimension
of the Enlightenment’s model incumbent on its focus on racism. More
important, since destructive criticism is more interested in the liberation
of what is closed off by metaphysical structure than in annihilating the
latter, this reconstellation of Heidegger’s Parmenides also enables us to
perceive its positive contributions: its disclosure that the Enlightenment’s
universalist reading of classical Greece is, in fact, an ideological con-
struction that has reduced the complex differential and always potential
plurality of ancient Greek culture to an unwarranted and disabling
identity or oneness. That is to say, Heidegger’s distinction between
Greek and Roman thinking in the Parmenides allows us to see that
Bernal’s extended account of the historical vicissitudes of the “Ancient
Model” goes far, if only in a certain symptomatic (i.e., unthought) way—
and despite its “African/Semitic” bias—to demonstrate that, contrary to
the “Aryan Model” (which I am claiming is simply a late allotrope of the
Roman model), the culture of Greek antiquity was pluralist, indeed,
multicultural. That is, if we understand its truth in terms of Heidegger’s
a-letheia and its notion of the polis as founded on the kind of agonistic
dialogue he calls Auseinandersetzung. (This is more or less the idea of the
polis that constitutes the point of departure of Arendt’s diagnosis of the
modern polity in The Human Condition, a book that, as far as I know, has
been entirely neglected by the classical scholars who are now debating
the question of the identity of classical Greece.)12
Understood according to the imperatives of the genealogy of the
European identity disclosed by reconstellating Heidegger’s Parmenides
into the debates precipitated by Bernal’s Black Athena, we need not
lament, as so many contemporary Western, including Greek, intellectu-
als do, the disintegration of the prevailing monumental/nationalist
image of classical Greek culture now irreversibly underway. On the
contrary, in locating the origins of Europe in metropolitan Rome, this
genealogy enables us to see classical Greece—its un-centeredness, its
originative thinking, its agonistic multicultural polity, its ethnic hybrid-
ity, and its distrust of, if not indifference to, the colonialist impulse—as
a heuristic model of renewal in the American “Age of the World
Picture.” By this I do not simply mean the age that has brought the
imperial logical economy of Western metaphysical thinking to its
fulfillment in the planetary “triumph” of instrumental reason, technol-
ogy, and its neo-imperialist global capitalist polity (what has been called
by Americans “the New World Order” or the Pax Americana). I also mean
the age that in thus “fulfilling” its essential imperial logic has come to its
end in another and less sanguine sense: namely, to its self-destructive
limit condition. It is the age, in other words, that has precipitated into
stark visibility (as the “age of Creon” precipitates the expressive silence
110 William V. Spanos

of Antigone) the finally uncontainable “other” as the specter that haunts

the West’s global hegemony.
This genealogy, in other words, enables, indeed, compels us to
rethink the hitherto obscured positive possibilities of this spectral “other”
of Western metaphysical/imperial thought and practice in all its manifes-
tations: not only the ontological difference precipitated by the fulfillment
of thinking meta ta physika, but also, and not least (though the compart-
mentalization of the indissoluble continuum of being has made this
connection the most difficult of perceptions not impossible) the enor-
mous population of displaced peoples unhomed by the fulfillment of
Western imperialism in the name of the “white man’s burden” or
“mission civilisatrice.” What this genealogy makes possible, in short, is the
transformation of the “other,” understood as a debilitating lack when
seen within the framework of the West, into a productive force of
decolonization precisely in its not being any longer answerable to that
totalizing framework.
Finally, I suggest, this genealogy that discloses ancient Greece not
as the decisive origin, but as an, if not the, “other” of the (Romanized)
West, should not be interpreted by contemporary Greeks as an
unwelcomed blow to their national pride. Such a response not only
belies a misplaced nostalgia for a classical Greece that never existed, but
also a vestigial complicity with a Western colonialism—European and
increasingly American—that, from the War of Independence through
the age of imperialism to the Greek Civil War of 1944–49, the military
dictatorship of 1967–74, the establishment of the European Union, and
the recent U.S. initiated “humanitarian” war against Serbia, has com-
ported itself towards Greece as a provincial, “undeveloped,” and colo-
nial Third World nation. More immediately, it also betrays a disabling
blindness to the subaltern role that the European Union, by way of the
seductions of the “common market” and the honorific aura of the word
“European,” is compelling Greece to play in the post-Cold War era.
To put it positively, the genealogy I have all too briefly disclosed by
way of Heidegger’s counter-mnemonic Parmenides enables us to retrieve
and to rethink the forgotten legacy of classical Greece in a way that
overcomes the disabling restraints imposed by the Enlightenment’s
Romanized representation of that legacy. It not only enables us to
retrieve and think this legacy in behalf of asserting the differential
identity of contemporary Greece against a powerful European “commu-
nity” bent on ventriloquizing the culture of this marginal people. It also
enables us to invoke this repressed legacy in behalf of harnessing what
Europe continues arrogantly to call its “underdeveloped” or “unim-
proved” or “backward” status—its vestigial “barbarism,” as it were—to a
discourse and sociopolitical practice that, unlike those disastrous dis-
 Heidegger’s Parmenides 111

courses and practices of the ethnic Balkan enclaves precipitated by the

disintegration of Yugoslavia, is attuned to the anti-nationalist and
multicultural imperatives of the present postcolonial context. Which is
to say, to the renewal of a global “Europeanized” polity that, though its
dominating constituencies represent it eschatalogically as the coming of
“good news”—the advent of a “new world order” (Fukuyama 1992:
xiii)—has, in fact, come to its ossified, sterile, and impotent, i.e.,
banalized, end.13 This imperative to rethink—to think anew—the very
idea of “civilization,” I suggest, is the subsuming directive that Heidegger’s
distinction between the ancient Greeks and Romans in the Parmenides
proffers, not least to that minority of contemporary Greeks who are
troubled (dislocated) by the increasing momentum in Greece towards
“Europeanization” and would thus think their contemporary occasion
outside/in the Europe problematic. This too, to retrieve a modern
Greek voice otherwise remote from Heidegger, is the directive
Constantine Cavafy proffers from outside/in the Greek problematic in
his great poem about the complicity of civilization and imperialism,
“Waiting for the Barbarians”(1904):
“And now what will become of us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.”

state university of new york at binghamton

NOTES

1
We must free ourselves once and for all from the flattering—and disabling—cliché,
inaugurated by Horace in his “Epistle” to the emperor Augustus and repeated ad nauseum
throughout the centuries up to the present (see Beard and Henderson 1995), that the
Roman conquest of Greece was in fact the Greek conquest of Rome in the sense that the
civilization of the latter—its literature, art, and culture—became utterly indebted to,
indeed, parasitic on, the conquered country: “Graecia capta ferum uictorem cepit.”
2
“The polemos named here is a conflict that prevailed prior to everything divine and
human, not war in the human sense. This conflict, as Heraclitus thought it, first caused the
realm of being to separate into opposites; it first gave rise to position and order and rank.
In such separation cleavages, intervals, distances, and joints opened. In the conflict [Aus-
einandersetzung, setting apart] a world comes into being. (Conflict does not split, much
less destroy unity. It constitutes unity, it is a binding-together, logos. Polemos and logos are the
same)” (Heidegger 1959:62). See also Heidegger (1993:174–75).
3
That the binary between civilized man and barbarian was for the Greeks a contested
one in a way that it was not for the Romans is borne witness by the telling example of
112 William V. Spanos

Herodotus’s remarkable openness to the barbaros—and by the Romanized Plutarch’s

representation of this openness as the malice of a “philobarbaros” in his long diatribe “On
the Malice of Herodotus” (Bernal 1987:113–14). For a fuller development of my
argument, see Spanos (2000:64–125).
4
Heidegger’s anticipation of Foucault’s and Said’s analysis and critique of modern
power relations is made even clearer in his “recapitulation” of this distinction later in the
Parmenides: “mere ‘felling’ in the sense of striking down is the coarsest way, but not the
genuinely essential imperial way, of bringing to a fall. The great and most inner core of the
essence of essential domination consists in this, that the dominated are not kept down, nor
simply despised, but, rather, that they themselves are permitted, within the territory of
command, to offer their services for the continuation of the domination” (Heidegger
1992:45).
5
Unlike Heidegger, Foucault does not focalize the decisive role that Rome played in
post-Revolutionary/Enlightenment Europe. But as his genealogy of the disciplinary society
makes clear, he is very much aware of the pervasive scope of this “Roman reference”:
“Historians of ideas attribute the dream of a perfect society to the philosophers and jurist
of the eighteenth century; but there was also a military dream of society; its fundamental
reference was not to the state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cog of a
machine, not to the primal social contract but to permanent coercions, not to fundamen-
tal rights, but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will but to
automatic docility. ‘Discipline must be national,’ said Guibert. ‘The state that I depict will
have a simple, reliable, easily controlled administration. It will resemble those huge
machines, which by quite uncomplicated means produce great effects. . . .’ The
Napoleonic regime was not far off and with it the from of state that was to survive it and,
we must not forget, the foundations of which were laid not only by jurists, but also by
soldiers . . . not only the men of the courts, but also the men of the camps. The Roman
reference that accompanied this formation certainly bears with it this double index:
citizens and legionaries, law and manoeuvres” (Foucault 1977:169).
6
This adjective referring to the indigenous population of spaces identified as
“desert,” “wilderness,” etc., by colonialist “planters”/“cultivators” pervaded the discourse
of Western colonialism during period of exploration (especially of North and South
America). And it is based on that allotrope of metaphysics (the teleological interpretation
of time) that assumes the becomingness of being to be informed by a teleological organic
process: the seed that, by way of cultivation, matures to bear fruit. Later, in the post-
imperialist era, this “white metaphor” of the “age of exploration” became the “whiter”
metaphor, “undeveloped.” In thematizing this continuity, I am challenging the received
genealogy, adopted by Gourgouris (1996:67), of the binary “developed”/“undeveloped,”
which traces its geopolitical use back to 1871 (“arguably the height of British colonialism”)
and restricts its meaning to the matter of economism. Such a genealogy, like the
Foucauldian tendency to perceive the Enlightenment as an epistemic rupture, obscures
the metaphoricity of the terms and thus its origins in the Roman’s founding identification
of civilization and agriculture, planting and colonization (the planter was also a settler—
Latin: colon, whose correlate is agricola: domesticator of the agros/agrios, the wilderness).
For a fuller treatment of this genealogy, see Spanos (2000:41–44, 96–98, 238–40). See also
(Waswo 1997).
7
As Gourgouris observes, “It is certainly unlikely that before the infiltration of
European Philhellenism the inhabitants of Kastri knew (or cared much, for that matter)
that they were indeed the inhabitants of Delphi” (1996:149).
8
For a persuasive view of the Greek Enlightenment discourse that claims a greater
autonomy from its European models, see the chapters entitled “The Formal Imagination,
I: The Backroads of Development for Enlightenment to Bureaucracy,” and “The Formal
 Heidegger’s Parmenides 113

Imagination, II: Natural History and Natural Pedagogy,” in Gourgouris (1996:47–112). In

its appropriation of a postcolonial perspective that owes much to poststructuralist theory,
Gourgouris’s book constitutes an important contribution to Modern Greek Studies. One
wonders, however, what would happen to his (ontological?) thesis of historical discontinu-
ity had his problematic not prevented him from perceiving what I have been calling “the
Roman reference” that haunts his text, not least in his account of the Byzantine factor.
9
“Contemporary Greece as a state and as a political entity and a historical experi-
ence, remains the most spectacular and interesting construct of [Enlightenment] ideal-
ism. Conceived by romantic Hellenism, established by the most intricate and paradoxical
interplay of international political, economic, and ideological forces, and sublimated
consistently by all subsequent quests for the true origins of Western civilization, it
continues to exert an incessant fascination on our imagination, for it is presumed to be a
unique case of historical, racial, and cultural continuity. . . . [The] inhabitants of the
ancient place, starting in the late eighteenth century and especially after the successful
revolt against the four-century old Turkish domination, found themselves under immense
external pressure to respond adequately to the inflated expectations and to adjust
properly to the exalted demands of European and American romanticism which, from
Goethe to Beethoven and from Shelley to Delacroix, needed to affirm and satisfy its
classical yearnings; This pressure to be true Hellenes was presented to the Greeks as their
only way or chance to define an acceptable identity and justify their political claims. The
choices were limited and the time for reflection unavailable; after much hesitation, they,
and especially those who considered themselves ‘victors,’ opted for cooperation”
(Lambropoulos 1988:7–8).
10
The power of this interpretive framework is so great that even acutely discrimina-
tory postcolonial critics like Edward Said adhere to it in the very process of calling its use
into question. Indeed, Said traces the very origins of Western “Orientalism” back to the
Greek representation of the Persian War—Homer, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Euripides. In
classical Greek literature “A line is drawn between two continents. Europe is powerful and
articulate; Asia is defeated and distant. Aeschylus [in the Persians, for example] represents
Asia. . . . It is Europe that articulates the Orient. This articulation is the prerogative, not of
a puppet master, but of a genuine creator, whose life-giving power represents, animates,
constitutes the otherwise silent and dangerous space beyond familiar boundaries. There is
an analogy between Aeschylus’s orchestra, which contains the Asiatic world as the
playwright conceives it, and the learned envelope of Orientalist scholarship, which also will
hold in the vast amorphous Asiatic sprawl for sometimes sympathetic, but always
dominating scrutiny” (Said 1979:57). Given the retroactive power of this interpretive
framework, it becomes virtually impossible to think the relation between center and
periphery as the inverse of its traditional representation, that is, to think the struggle
between Greece and Persia as an effort on the part of the Greek “other” to resist the
colonizing project of a metropolitan imperial power.
11
Space prohibits extended de-structive readings of the texts I have cited all too
laconically here. For fuller treatment of a number of them, see the chapter entitled
“Culture and Colonization: The Imperial Imperatives of the Centered Circle,” in America’s
Shadow (Spanos 2000:64–125). See also “The Women of Apartness: Outside/In Western
Imperialism,” the unpublished dissertation of Assimina Karavanta (1999). As the subtitle
suggests, this ground-breaking study offers radically novel readings of three Greek
tragedies involving women—Sophocles’ Antigone, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, and Media—
that call brilliantly and persuasively into question the sedimented post-Enlightenment
binarist assumption that women (and the cultural values associated with them) were
absolutely bereaved of a voice in a male dominated classical Greece that separated the oikos
from the polis. The resonance of their silence, according to Karavanta, which is heard in
114 William V. Spanos

the theater of the polis, bears witness to the Greek tragedians’ consciousness of gender
relations as a contested political issue.
12
See especially the sections entitled “The Greek Solution” and “Power and the Space
of Appearance” (Arendt 1958:192–207).
13
See Jacques Derrida’s critique of Fukuyama’s invocation of an eschatalogical
rhetoric to announce this “new world order” (Derrida 1994:56–65).

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