ACADEMIA Letters Heidegger, Lao Tzu and the Pre-Socratics: Thinking Being Greg Emery Martin Heidegger’s overriding philosophic interest and concern, as is well known, was to ask the “Being question,” i.e., to ask after the meaning of Being: “Why is there something and not nothing?” Heidegger returned to the pre-Socratics with the hope of fnding a diferent way to meaningfully ask this question. He posited that the early Greek thinkers, the pre-Socratics, had themselves been concerned with this question. Heidegger’s revelations regarding the pre-Socratics also opens vistas (both intentional and unintentional) for exploring similarities in Heidegger’s existential phenomenology and Lao Tzu’s Taoism – especially in terms of thinking’s relationship to Being. This project might be described as a “recalling return to the way in which the great pre-Socratic thinkers authen- tically thought [about] Being … a return to that area where metaphysics obtained and still retains its origins, even after the forgetting of Being.” (Seidel, 1978) The forgetting of Being – which (Heidegger claims) has occurred over time since the days of the pre-Socratics – is (again as Heidegger claims) a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship of Being to beings or Being to things. For the pre-Socratics, (the understanding of) Being was not divorced from things. Rather, for these early Greek thinkers, Being was that which allowed beings to Be. Being, for the pre-Socratics, was not a remote entity but a “way” things appeared. Be- ing and things were not “metaphysical opponents” but essentially belonged together, to one another. Though they were not identical, they were nevertheless inseparable. For these early Greek thinkers, Being was, a dynamic “presencing presence” in the sense, perhaps, that Being was more verb-like than noun-like. One now might ask, however, how is it that Being came to be (mis)understood as a thing or even the ultimate thing among things? According to Heidegger, the pre-Socratics – Par- menides and Heraclitus specifcally – agreed that the belonging-together of Being and beings Academia Letters, October 2021 Corresponding Author: Greg Emery, gregoryalanemery@gmail.com Citation: Emery, G. (2021). Heidegger, Lao Tzu and the Pre-Socratics: Thinking Being. Academia Letters, Article 3650. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3650. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0