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1. First of All Came Chaos
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1 First of All Came Chaos Drew A. Hyland Martin Heidegger’s work on the Greeks has long been controversial. This very character has led some of us to write with a certain critical orientation toward his interpretations. Such is altogether appropriate in respect to one whose thinking is as groundbreaking as Heidegger’s. Above all, however , the work of Martin Heidegger should teach us to think. By way, then, of trying to learn from Heidegger’s ways of reading the Greeks: Tell me all of this, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus, from the beginning, tell who ¤rst of them (the gods) came-to-be. First of all Chaos came-to-be; but then afterwards Broad-breasted earth, a secure dwelling place forever for all [the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus], and misty Tartara in the depths under the wide-wayed ground, and Eros who, handsomest among the deathless gods, a looser of limbs, in all the gods and in all human beings overpowers in their breasts their intelligence and careful planning. And from Chaos came-to-be both Erebos and dark night, and from night, in turn, came-to-be both Aither and day, whom she conceived and bore after joining in love with Erebos. But earth ¤rst begat, as an equal to herself, starry sky, so that he might cover her on all sides, in order to be a secure dwelling place forever for all the blessed gods, and she begat the tall mountains, pleasing haunts of the goddess-nymphs who make their homes in the forested hills, and also she bore the barren main with its raging swell, the sea, all without any sweet act of love; but then next, having lain with sky, she bore deep-swirling ocean.1 An easy, even inviting interpretation of this Hesiodic beginning of all things presents itself if we take Hesiod’s “chaos” in the modern English sense of the word. First of all there was an unintelligible, undifferentiated, unarticulable condition, perhaps a pre¤guration of the now well-known “primal soup,” chaos. Out of that primal mess, ever so gradually, developed the intelligible, identi¤able cosmos. “From chaos to cosmos.” Hesi- odic chaos might then be read as a pre¤guration of Anaximander’s to apeiron , “the inde¤nite,” as the arche of all. Or it might be read as akin to any number of accounts of the coming-to-be of things, in any number of cultures sharing this notion of a primordial, unintelligible confusion out of which an ordered cosmos arises. There is no doubt something attractive, perhaps even obvious, about such an account. But in the case of Hesiod, this account is troubled by a number of considerations . Most of all it is troubled by the fact that Hesiod’s Greek chaos does not mean the same as its modern English transliteration. Rather, it means something more like “gap,” a “yawn,” a separation.2 Moreover, a second trouble, we are not told that the primordial chaos, understood as some sort of unarticulable confusion, always was, and out of it, gradually, a cosmos came to be. We are told that ¤rst of all chaos itself “came-tobe ” (genet’). So we must understand Hesiod as teaching that ¤rst of all a gap, a separation , came-to-be.Thisisaltogethermore puzzling and thought-provoking than the usual reading of a primordial chaos in the modern sense. First of all a gap came to be? One is tempted to ask almost immediately, a gap between what? Does not the very notion of a gap, a separation, require the prior presence, or at very least the co-presence, of the entities separated by the gap? Yet Hesiod does not say, “First of all came-to-be Chaos and earth and Tartara and eros . . .” He says, “First of all Chaos came-to-be; but then, afterwards, broad-breasted earth [autar epeita Gai].” Nevertheless, almost from the time the original meaning of Hesiod’s chaos as gap or separation was taken seriously, the question was asked, and answers ventured, as to what the entities were that were separated by Chaos. As early as Cornford’s 1941 essay “A Ritual Basis for Hesiod’s Theogony ,”3 what became the orthodox reading was established. Chaos is the gap or separation between earth and sky. Once this interpretation was reaf ¤rmed in Kirk and Raven’s The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts,4 it became virtually...