SS1921 Seminar on De Anima (along with Metaphysics Z): Student Transcripts Recently Published

Heidegger reads Aristotle’s De Anima, and with some justification, as an ontology of life, that is, as an account of what kind of being characterizes living things. He, therefore, reads De Anima with the account of being, specifically ousia, to be found in the Metaphysics. The sudden realization during the seminar, already noted, that the central chapters (7–9) of Metaphysics VII devoted to becoming (genesis) are central to the account of ousia there inaugurates that focus on the being of kinêsis (motion) and the kinêsis of being that will subsequently make Heidegger focus on the Physics and that will guide the whole of his reading of Aristotle. As I have argued elsewhere (Gonzalez Reference Gonzalez2018b), in this coupling of the question of the being of a living being with the question of being in general and in the addressing of both from the perspective of the phenomenon of motion, this seminar on De Anima anticipates the general structure and content of the investigation that will be published as Being and Time. Yet the focus here, unlike that of Being and Time, is the ontology of life. It is significant in this regard that Heidegger had the idea of following up the seminar on De Anima with a seminar in the Fall on Aristotle’s biological works.Footnote ¹³ Unfortunately, he did not follow through on this idea.

WS1921/22 Lecture Course Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung (Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Introduction to Phenomenological Research): Published as Gesamtausgabe 61

This course does not offer the interpretation of Aristotle it promises in its title. It is instead a version of the general philosophical “introduction” to what would become the projected book on Aristotle. We know that Heidegger repeatedly revised this introduction and what is published in the Gesamtausgabe volume does not indicate these later revisions.Footnote ¹⁴ One significant later revision that can be identified as such in Heidegger’s surviving manuscript (75.7044, p. 8) concerns the thesis he will first defend in the autumn of 1922: that for Aristotle “being=being-produced.” The published passage is as follows, with the later insertion in brackets:

We will see the inserted claim about the “Greek logic of objects” come to dominate Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle starting with the Fall of 1922. In the course as delivered in 1921/22, this claim was not yet made, as is also shown by the preserved notes of Helene Weiss (WPIA) that contain no trace of it.

SS1922 Lecture Course Phänomenologische Interpretationen Ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik (Phenomenological Interpretations of Selected Treatises of Aristotle on Ontology and Logic): Published as Gesamtausgabe 62

Providing the reading of Aristotle promised in the preceding course, and therefore to be seen not only as its continuationFootnote ¹⁶ but also as its point,Footnote ¹⁷ this course translates and interprets the first two chapters of Metaphysics I followed by the early chapters of Physics I. The topic of the former text is wisdom (sophia) as the highest possibility of human existence, the one indeed that approximates us to the divine. But if Heidegger in the course turns from the Metaphysics to the Physics rather than vice versa, this is because he surprisingly sees the former as grounded in the latter. The reason is clear in the title of a section of the course that provides the transition: “The manners of illuminating, as well as the highest way of genuine understanding, as ways in which life gets around and thereby seen in the fundamental character of movement (κίνησις) …” (GA62). Even wisdom is possible only as a movement of human life; therefore, its possibility, and accordingly that of metaphysics itself, cannot be understood without an understanding of the phenomenon of movement as analyzed in the Physics. In this course, Heidegger does not yet turn to the explicit definition of movement in Physics III. Instead, he focuses on a necessary preliminary: Aristotle’s critique of those philosophers who would exclude movement from being, that is, the Eleatics. Such an exclusion would not only destroy the possibility of physics, as Aristotle argues, but also, in Heidegger’s view, the possibility of metaphysics or ontology itself.

Autumn of 1922: The So-called Natorp Bericht with the Proposal for a Book on Aristotle

Clarification is necessary here on where this text stands in relation to other texts Heidegger was working on in the period, as this clarity is lacking in the secondary literature. Specifically, we must distinguish between the following:

1. 1) the text of the WS 1921/22 course, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle”

2. 2) a text also entitled “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle” and presumably drawing on the course but including the discussion of Aristotelian texts undertaken only in the SS1922 course. Heidegger intended to publish this text in Husserl’s Jahrbuch in the autumn of 1922, as he tells Jaspers as early as June 27, 1922 (Heidegger and Jaspers Reference Heidegger, Jaspers, Biemel and Sauer1990, 29), Georg Misch on June 30, 1922,Footnote ¹⁸ and Gadamer on September 29, 1922;Footnote ¹⁹ this project is confirmed by Husserl himself, who in December is claiming that Heidegger’s text will appear soon in volume VII of the Jahrbuch (HBW III, 217). This publication was never realized.

3. 3) The Natorp Bericht which Heidegger worked on for three weeks only after September 26, when he heard of Natorp’s request for a writing sample made to Husserl in a letter of September 22.Footnote ²⁰ According to Heidegger himself, he excerpted himself in writing this report,Footnote ²¹ presumably using parts of the text he was preparing for publication.Footnote ²²

4. 4) The book on Aristotle Heidegger projected in the Natorp Bericht: presumably a longer version of the text Heidegger had originally intended to publish in the autumn of 1922.Footnote ²³ We must assume that what he told Gadamer in September of 1922 would be in print in the “next weeks” cannot be the same text that he would still be working on until 1925.Footnote ²⁴

Of these different texts, we possess today only (1) and (3), the latter itself discovered and published only in 1989. It is in the report, and not in the 1921–22 course as originally delivered, that we find for the first time Heidegger’s thesis that “being=being-produced” for Aristotle, a thesis that will dominate his reading at least during the 1920s, as we will see. The key passage is the following:

It is important to understand this thesis as a response to the important question that immediately precedes it in the text, a question that suggests it as only one of two possible answers:

Heidegger immediately responds, without explanation or justification: “The object field that produces the original meaning of being is that of the things that are produced (hergestellt), objects taken up in use in one’s surroundings.” Thus, what Heidegger’s thesis is claiming is that Aristotle did not derive the meaning of being in terms of which life is interpreted from a fundamental experience of life itself, but rather from the experience of the objects (human) life produces and uses in its dealings. But why is the first alternative in the previous question simply passed over without comment? Does not Heidegger’s own seminar on Aristotle’s ontology of life in De Anima, a seminar in which he asserted that the biological is the fundamental beginning of knowledge for Aristotle, give us reason to consider this first alternative as at least a possibility? Yet with the introduction of the thesis that being=being-produced for Aristotle (and for the Greeks), the possibility that Aristotle derived the meaning of being from a fundamental experience of life itself is left behind, as is De Anima, which is not central to the book on Aristotle Heidegger here projects and is interpreted extensively for the last time in the 1922–23 seminar, though, as we will see, it appears occasionally later and sometimes in contexts of great importance. According to the outline, the first part of the book was to be divided into three sections: (i) Nicomachean Ethics VI, (ii) Metaphysics A 1 and 2, and (iii) Physics A-E. A second part was to focus on the interpretation of Metaphysics Ζ Η Θ.Footnote ²⁵

WS1922–23 Seminar Übungen über Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Nikomachische Ethik VI; de anima; Metaphysik VII) (Exercises on Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle [Nicomachean Ethics VI; de anima; Metaphysics VII]): Unpublished. Texts Discussed Are De Anima III 9, Metaphysics VII 1–3, and Nicomachean Ethics VI 2

This seminar can be seen as a continuation of that of SS1921 to the extent that it continues the reading of De Anima, turning, after the focus on Book 2 in the earlier seminar, to Book 3, especially the later chapters on the “locomotive” power of the soul. But what Heidegger finds in this power, analyzed in terms of “desire” (orexis) and “intuition” (nous), is the movement that characterizes all life in its very being. This seminar nevertheless already moves away from De Anima in connecting its account of the power of locomotion with the account of orexis and nous in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, thus restricting the scope of Heidegger’s ontology from all life as such to human life. It is also here for the first time in the seminars that Heidegger introduces the central thesis noted earlier, while acknowledging that “The proposition ‘being=being-produced’ is not to be found in Aristotle. It is not explicit for him. The interpretation involves necessarily a leap, goes beyond that which is interpreted” (WUPIA, February 15, 1923).

SS1923 Continuation of the Preceding Seminar: Unpublished

It is the account of the “dianoetic” virtues in Nicomachean Ethics VI that becomes the exclusive focus of the summer continuation of the earlier seminar. Heidegger will return to this account in the WS1924–25 course on Plato’s Sophist. There is, of course, overlap between both interpretations, but the context and perspective are significantly different. In the WS1924–25 course, the focus is on the relation between phronêsis and sophia and the question of which has priority; and this is due to the context of an introduction to Plato. In the SS1923 seminar, the “dianoetic” virtues are interpreted in the context of an ontology of life, with an eye to how they illuminate the movement distinctive of (human) life. It is in this seminar that Heidegger will first draw a connection between Aristotle’s account of phronêsis and the notion of “conscience” (Gewissen) that will play such an important role in Being and Time (WC, 13). But note that in both cases the context is strictly ontological and the phenomenon at issue is the disclosedness of our being. We should also note that in the account of Gewissen in Being and Time, the debt to Aristotle goes completely unacknowledged.

SS1923 Seminar on Nicomachean Ethics I: Unpublished

Heidegger here for the first time turns to Book 1 of the Nicomachean Ethics, interpreting the first six chapters in some detail and sequentially. Ironically, the course (or the notes) breaks off right before Heidegger gets to Aristotle’s definition of the highest good at 1098a16–17 as “activity of the soul in accordance virtue” (though he will get to the definition in the SS1924 course). The primary goal of Heidegger’s reading can be said to be the interpretation of the being of human life as praxis. However, as a sign of the directing thesis that Aristotle interpreted being in terms of production, Heidegger makes no distinction between this praxis and poiêsis. While Aristotle opens the Ethics with the claim that “Every technê and every methodos, and likewise praxis and prohairesis, appear to aim at some good” (1094a1–2), a claim that clearly implies a distinction between the two sets of terms despite the common aim, Heidegger insists that they are all to be included within a broad sense of praxis understood as “taking care of something (etwas besorgen) (and in a completely indifferent sense = settling something [erledigen])” (WNE, 1). When he interprets the same line in the SS1924 course, the broader or more encompassing term will be said to be technê (GA18, 68). This is possible because a common feature of Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle after the introduction of the mentioned thesis is an elision of the distinction between praxis and poiêsis that assimilates the former to the latter in the notion of Besorgen: a notion that in Being and Time will interpret Dasein’s being-in-the-world in terms of dealings with “handy” things in producing and using them.

WS1923–24 Seminar on Physics II: Unpublished

In this seminar we have the only reading by Heidegger of Book II of the Physics during the 1920s and the only reading at any period that extends beyond the first chapter of Book II. In particular, we find here Heidegger’s only interpretation of chapters 4 to 6 in which Aristotle discusses the notions of tuchê (luck) and to automaton (chance). In Aristotle’s account of “luck,” which has the temporality of “sometimes, once in a while” and thus a historical temporality, Heidegger finds “an original account of temporality” never to be equaled, much less surpassed (WP, 12), even if Bergson attempted it in modern times. Interestingly, while Heidegger’s own account of temporality in Being and Time mentions Bergson, the original and unsurpassed insight into temporality attributed to Aristotle here goes completely unmentioned there; Aristotle’s contribution is instead there confined to the “vulgar” concept of time defined in the Physics.

WS1923–24 Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung (Introduction to Phenomenological Research): Published as Gesamtausgabe 17

This course begins with an elucidation of Aristotle’s understanding of phainomenon (that which shows itself ) through a reading of De Anima II 7, in which Aristotle discusses sight, its specific object which is color, and light as the activity (energeia) of the transparent qua transparent that makes sight possible. Significantly, Heidegger makes a point of emphasizing that darkness, as potential clarity (dunamei on), is not the mere negation of clarity, but something positive that also can let things be seen (10). Furthermore, for Heidegger the phainomenon is not simply what is strictly visible (which is color), but includes what Aristotle describes as perceived “coincidentally” (kata sumbebêkos), that is, with color: houses, trees, and people. In the end, what is phainomenon is beings themselves in their presence. Heidegger then turns to an account of the logos apophantikos (speech that lets something show itself ) through a reading of On Interpretation ( peri hermêneias), described by Heidegger as “not a text, but a manuscript belonging to his latest period, growing out of a momentary reflection, which found no kind of pedagogical arrangement” (14). The elucidation here of the term phenomenology in terms of its Greek components of phainomenon and logos will later form section 7 of Being and Time. However, the discussion in Being and Time does not refer to either Aristotelian text. Furthermore, Heidegger focuses here on the phenomenon of falsehood or deception. “Apophantikos” is speech that “presents beings as unconcealed or presents them in such a way that in this showing something is ‘placed before’ [vorgemacht]” (20), and that therefore can be true or false. Heidegger explains – an insight he also attributes to Aristotle – that human beings live the greatest part of the time in deception (Täuschung, 25). This question returns him to De Anima and a detailed analysis of the account of perception there. An important thesis is that aisthêsis, as a “discriminating” (krinein) that yet unifies what it discriminates (in perceiving now both “green” and “sweet” together, I perceive their difference), is already in itself a kind of speaking: “we see through speech” (30). And speech, while having the fundamental function of showing, can cover things up when it is not appropriated in an original way (30). To further explore the possibility of falsehood and deception, Heidegger turns to Metaphysics V, 29, where Aristotle distinguishes between three meanings of pseudos: (1) a false thing; (2) a false logos; and (3) a false man. Heidegger sees these as three perspectives pointing to a fundamental phenomenon that Aristotle did not see: the facticity of speech itself as our way of living in the world. We live in the world in such a way that we go around things and things escape us (what Heidegger calls the Umständigkeit and Entgänglichkeit of the world, 36–37). The possibility of deception belongs not just to speech, but to the world itself (39–40). The result is a characterization of phainomena as “things existing in the factical world in relation to which human beings for the most part are deceived [versieht]; i.e., that which immediately shows itself so directly is now something that only looks that way, that appears” (38). In locating the possibility of falsehood in “synthesis” and “division,” Aristotle sees to some extent that the possibility of falsehood is rooted in the fact that we always encounter things in the world as this or that (and most fundamentally as pleasant or painful). It is also worth noting that Heidegger, in the context of his discussion of perception, repeats a central point of his earlier reading of De Anima: that the soul is dunamis, where this word “does not mean power, capability, but rather a completely concrete way of being” (295; see also 26, 30). As the way of being of living things, the soul is a being-possible (Möglichsein: the same expression that will be used in Being and Time to characterize the being of Dasein). Importantly, given the apparent tension with what is claimed elsewhere, Heidegger claims here that the notions of dunamis and energeia have their origin in this being-possible that characterizes life (26).

SS1924 Course Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie (Fundamental Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy): Published as Gesamtausgabe 18

In a way that reveals his own approach to Aristotle, Heidegger begins this course by exhorting his students not simply to learn and repeat or apply Aristotle’s concepts, but instead to imitate what he does (“nicht nachreden, sondern nachmachen!” GA18, 339): “to see and determine the thing itself with the same originality and genuineness” (15). The first part of the course turns to the Ethics for an interpretation of Dasein’s being-in-the-world, interpreting the “good” (ἀγαθόν) not as an aim of human life, but as “‘end’ in the sense of constituting a completeness [Fertigkeit]” and as such “a determination of the being of human beings in the world” (65). As becomes explicit later, this interpretation of the agathon and telos is grounded in an understanding of being as being-produced (214). The first part of the course also turns to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, taken to be “nothing other than the interpretation of concrete Dasein, the hermeneutics of Dasein itself ” (110), specifically in its attuned (pathê) being in the world with others. Heidegger can give such philosophical importance to the Rhetoric and its art of persuasion, against the tendency going back to Plato of opposing philosophy and persuasion, because of the following claim concerning Dasein that will become so central to Being and Time: “The primary orientation, the illumination of its being-in-the-world is no knowing, but rather a finding-itself-disposed (Sichbefinden) that in each case can be determined differently according to a being’s manner of existing” (262). The second part of the course finally provides that reading of Physics III that Heidegger has been moving toward since the first seminar of SS1921 where he came to recognize the significance of movement or becoming for Aristotle’s thought. What makes the turn to Physics III necessary here is Heidegger’s view that “κίνησις: guiding thread for the explication of the being of the Dasein of man” (273). In this text Aristotle defines kinêsis as “the entelecheia of what is dunamei qua being dunamei” (201a10–11). How one understands this difficult definition depends, of course, on how one translates the key concepts left untranslated here. Translating/interpreting entelecheia as “presence” (Gegenwart, 296) and dunamei on quite surprisingly as “significance” (Bedeutsamkeit, 300, 370), Heidegger translates/interprets the definition as “motion is the presence of being capable as such” (313, 315) and gives the example: “Insofar as it is there, the wood is in motion. Insofar as the wood is there in the genuine sense as capable of being a crate, is there motion” (313). The obvious objection to this interpretation is that while the wood may have significance through the mere presence of its capability of being a crate, it is clearly not thereby in motion. Recognizing this possible objection, Heidegger can respond only by insisting that rest is a type of motion (as its limit case, 314), thereby turning Aristotle’s definition of motion into equally a definition of rest. The problem is that motion clearly requires not only that a capability be present but also that it be active. Yet Heidegger insists on distinguishing entelecheia from energeia (characterized as “what is not yet complete,” 381–2) and translating it as “presence.” This serves the two ends of Heidegger’s “destruction.” First, it supports his thesis that the understanding of both kinêsis and being is derived from poiêsis and only subsequently applied to nature (see 329, 381). Secondly, it allows him to appropriate Aristotle’s definition of motion for what will become his own account in Being and Time of “significance” as characterizing Dasein’s being-in-the-world.

The 1924 Lecture “Dasein und Wahrsein nach Aristoteles (Interpretation von Buch VI der Nikomachischen Ethik)” (“Being-There and Being-True According to Aristotle [Interpretation of Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics]”)

A draft of this lecture has been published in Gesamtausgabe 80.1, but the lecture as actually delivered in December 1924 differed significantly from this draft.Footnote ²⁶ A major difference is that in the lecture as delivered, and not in the draft, we find the thesis that the concept of being medieval theology inherited from the Greeks and applied to the understanding of god was a concept the Greeks derived from the world. In the delivered lecture, Heidegger therefore described his own task as that of “creating an ontology of Dasein in contrast to the ontology of the world” (Kisiel and Sheehan Reference Kisiel and Sheehan2011, 228). There exists a clear explanation for this difference: The thesis added in delivery was that of the contemporaneous WS1924–25 course on the Middle Ages. Yet despite the thesis that the Greeks derived their concept of being from the being of the world, with the result that applying this concept to our own being must fundamentally misinterpret it, the lecture shows Heidegger developing the ontology of Dasein he will present in Being and Time through an interpretation of the “dianoetic” virtues in Book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics: the interpretation he began in SS1923 and will continue in WS1924–25. Heidegger, therefore, concludes the lecture by speaking of the need to learn from the Greeks.

WS1924–25 seminar Zur Ontologie des M A [Mittelalters]: Kleine Summa des Thomas (Ontology of the Middles Ages: Small Summa of Thomas): Unpublished

While the ostensive topic of this important seminar is medieval ontology, most of it is devoted to a reading of Aristotle in defending the thesis already noted earlier: that what medieval ontology inherits from the Greeks is an ontology of the world by which it then misinterprets both the divine being and our own being, neither of which is a thing in the world. Here Heidegger turns for the first time to an extended treatment of Metaphysics IX (Theta). It is indeed his most extensive treatment, given that it is not confined to the first three chapters of the book as the later SS1931 course will be nor to the end of the book as the WS1942/43 seminar will be. The broader scope here is important. Given the central role Heidegger grants kinêsis, and therefore the Physics, in Aristotle’s ontology, he always interprets the fundamental notions of dunamis and energeia in terms of, and as derived from, kinêsis. Yet in Metaphysics IX Aristotle claims that the senses of dunamis and energeia relative to motion are not the most useful for his aim there and that these notions extend beyond motion (1045b36–1046a1). He then discusses the senses relative to motion in chapters 1 to 5 only to prepare the turn in chapter 6 to the senses not relative to motion. In this chapter Aristotle indeed explicitly distinguishes between energeia and kinêsis, claiming that the former possesses its end (telos) within itself whereas the latter does not, that energeia therefore by definition is “complete” whereas kinêsis is by definition incomplete, and that the two therefore have different relations to time: The former allowing the simultaneous use of present and perfect tenses (“I see and have seen”) and the latter not (“in building the house, I have not built it, and in having built it, I am not still building it”). In SS1931 Heidegger preserves the centrality of kinêsis in his interpretation by confining himself to the early chapters, where Aristotle is speaking of dunamis and energeia relative to motion, and he ignores altogether chapter 6. In WS1924–25, in contrast, he confronts the difficult challenge of reconciling his interpretation with what is said in chapter 6. At the same time his reading must defend the general thesis of the course. He attempts to achieve both goals by interpreting energeia and the associated notion of entelecheia in terms of being-present and being-complete in the sense of being-finished: An interpretation that preserves their relation to motion since motion is understood as moving toward presence and completion.

WS1924–25 Course on Plato’s Sophist: Published as Gesamtausgabe 19

The first part of the course is a reading of Nicomachean Ethics VI on the “dianoetic” virtues. As noted earlier, it continues the SS1923 reading, but with a greater emphasis on the relation between phronêsis and sophia, or rather, the opposition between them. This emphasis results in a rather different account of phronêsis from that in SS1923, one that stresses its inferiority to sophia. For example, while in SS1923 Heidegger in interpreting a contentious passage (1144a4–5) claims that both phronêsis and sophia produce happiness in the way that health produces health, in WS1924–25 he claims that only sophia does this, phronêsis producing happiness in the way medicine produces health, that is, as something distinct from and external to itself (GA19, 170). Furthermore, while in SS1923 he characterized phronêsis as positively integrated into our character, in WS1924–25 he interprets it as dependent on character in a way that rids it of the kind of independence sophia enjoys (GA19, 166). In short, the two accounts of phronêsis merit careful comparison. The association of phronêsis with Gewissen is repeated here, but in a more extreme form that moves toward an identification: “Phronêsis is nothing other than that conscience that makes an action transparent when set in motion” (56).

The WS1925–26 Course Logik: die Frage nach der Wahrheit (Logic: The Question of Truth): Published as Gesamtausgabe 21

The most significant contribution of this course to the interpretation of Aristotle is Heidegger’s translation of, and detailed commentary on, Metaphysics IX 10, though the reading is prepared by some discussion of On Interpretation and Metaphysics IV 7. What draws Heidegger to this chapter of Metaphysics IX is that here and only here Aristotle explicitly treats of “truth” as a meaning of being, even claiming it to be, to the consternation of many scholars, the most genuine sense of being (to de kuriôtaton on alêthes ê pseudos, 1051b1–2). Truth does not have its primary locus in the statement, but rather in being itself. In this chapter Aristotle first grounds the “synthesis” and “division” that give logos the power to be true or false (e.g., “The cloak is white” or “The cloak is not black”) in a synthesis or division in beings themselves: It is because “cloak” and “white” are combined in the thing itself and because “cloak” and “black” are not combined in the thing itself that the cited sentences are true. Being in the sense of truth is being-combined and not-being in the sense of falsehood is being-divided (the second sentence is true because it is false that cloak and black are combined, i.e, false because they are divided). But Aristotle here recognizes truth even, or rather primarily, in being that admits of no combination or division. In this case, “truth” is simply being-seen or touched and there is no possibility of falsehood. Even in saying falsely that “the cloak is black,”, that is, presenting as combined what is divided in the thing itself, what a cloak is, the being of a cloak, must be simply given to me in intuition. What Heidegger wishes to show is that if the possibility of falsehood presupposes the possibility of combination/division in the beings themselves, this in turn presupposes that their being is unconcealed. It is truth as unconcealment that represents the most genuine sense of being. “Unconcealment [Entdecktheit] takes up the answer to the question of being. A character of being of beings, and indeed of the most genuine being, the simple, is determined through unconcealment” (GA21, 190). The significance of this analysis for Heidegger’s own conception of truth as unconcealment that grounds the derivative truth of a statement is evident. This perspective allows Heidegger to interpret the chapter as the culmination of the ontological investigation of Metaphysics VII to IX, rather than as the aberration it is taken to be by those who assume “truth” to be a topic for epistemology and not ontology.

The WS1925–26 Seminar on Hegel’s Logic I, Unpublished

This course, while indeed focused on Hegel, contains a very important discussion on Aristotle’s account of time in the Physics. It is thus the first major treatment of this account in Heidegger’s seminars. Interestingly, however, the actual exposition of Aristotle’s account is entrusted to one of Heidegger’s students in the seminar, none other than H. G. Gadamer, with Heidegger only asking questions and raising objections. A major point of contention is how to understand the now’s function of both connecting and dividing time. Heidegger insists that it does so in remaining self-same throughout time, while Gadamer maintains that it does so instead through constant self-differentiation. Heidegger will stick to his interpretation instead of Gadamer’s when he later provides his own reading.Footnote ²⁷ It should also be noted here that Heidegger gave another seminar on Aristotle and Hegel in SS1927. Heidegger’s notes for the seminar have been published in GA86, though they are unfortunately very spare and cryptic and are not supplemented by any protocol or student transcript. We can nevertheless see that again the major focus was on Hegel’s Logic and that Aristotle received comparatively little discussion. We can also see that what was discussed was not Aristotle’s account of time, as in WS1925–26, but rather Aristotle’s account of the different senses of being (beyond the categories; see 43–45). There is indeed a reference back to a similar discussion in the SS1926 course to be considered here next. In both cases, Heidegger seeks to ground the unity of the different senses of being in a conception of being in terms of production (Hergestelltheit) and therefore as “presence-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit).

The SS1926 Course Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie (Fundamental Concepts of Ancient Philosophy): Published as Gesamtausgabe 22

Given the broad scope of this course, which not only covers the Presocratics and Plato as well but, in the case of Aristotle, pretends to cover the whole of his philosophy, one might expect only a superficial and schematic treatment of Aristotle that adds nothing to what is learned from preceding seminars. However, the very order of Heidegger’s presentation must strike us as somewhat new and even surprising: After starting with a discussion of being in the sense of the categories and transitioning to being in the sense of dunamis and energeia, with being in the senses of sumbebêkos and alêtheia being discussed in between, Heidegger’s interpretation culminates in a discussion of De Anima: A text that last received detailed discussion from him in the seminar of 1922–3 and that was left out of the central plan of the prospectus for a book on Aristotle of 1922. Now, as earlier, Heidegger insists that De Anima is a work of ontology, not psychology: Its theme is life as the being of living things. Furthermore, Heidegger clearly distinguishes the ontology of life at issue in De Anima from the ontology of Dasein (148). Perhaps most surprisingly, the ontology of Dasein, and therefore the Nicomachean Ethics, which has been the central focus of Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle since the prospectus of 1922, now receives only minimal treatment at the end of Heidegger’s notes and briefly in the course according to the Mörchen transcript (311–313). It is as if, with Being and Time being written during this time, Heidegger was done with the ontology of Dasein (at least for now) and, in returning to Aristotle, changed his focus to the meaning (or meanings) of being and the being of life as such.

Because this course is pivotal in recapitulating earlier elements of Heidegger’s reading while introducing new ones, it merits a more detailed presentation. With being in the sense of the categories, we clearly see being interpreted according to the structure of logos, given that the categories are different ways of saying something of something (quality: “The rock is hard”; quantity: “Socrates is tall”;Footnote ²⁸ place: “The tree stands alongside the path”, etc.). “The determinations of being are characterized from the perspective of λόγος. Orientation of the question of being according to λόγος” (296). The different ways of saying something of something reflect different ways of being-present-together (Mitvorhandensein): Having a quality is one way of being-present-together-with, having a quantity is another way, and so on. All the other categories refer to a primary sense of being = ousia because they can all be present-at-hand only in being-present-at-hand with ousia. Ousia, therefore, itself is what is present-at-hand (vorhanden), present (anwesend) in a primary and unqualified sense. The conception of being that is determinative here is thus being = Vorhandenheit, Anwesenheit. But there are other senses of being besides being in the sense of the categories: (2) being in the sense of the “coincidental” (Heidegger: Zugeratenheit), (3) being in the sense of truth, and (4) being in the sense of dunamis and energeia. Sense (2) is excluded from the science of being because it lacks “constancy” (Beständigkeit) and sense (3) is excluded because it lacks independence (Eigenständigkeit), that is, it is not found in the beings themselves, but in the connecting and dividing carried out in thought (304). (Heidegger argues that the characterization of “truth” as the most genuine sense of being in Metaphysics IX [Theta] 10 is not inconsistent with the exclusion of truth in thought from the science of being and instead follows from the fact that being is presence: truth as unconcealment [Entdecktheit] heightens being, representing a higher mode of being as presence: what is unconcealed is what is most present: 306). As for dunamis and energeia (which Heidegger characterizes as “the most difficult” phenomena in Greek and Aristotelian ontology, 315), they are for Heidegger modes of presence and therefore modes of ousia (307, 331). But the crucial claim is that they are derived from the phenomenon of motion, and most particularly from the phenomenon of production (“in handwerklicher Bewegung,” 174). Something can be present-at-hand as simply ready-for …, or as simply present-at-hand, finished. The wood is ready for being a table, the motion of production is the presence of this readiness as such, and the motion ends with the table now finished and present-at-hand.

These concepts of dunamis and energeia “are now transferred from that which is produced to what moves itself ” (323), that is, what is alive. What is distinctive of life is that the end, the telos, is not outside the movement as a product, but is in the movement itself as a mode of it (323). Yet the first claim is from the Bröcker transcript. In Heidegger’s own notes we read something quite different when he explains the turn to De Anima and to Aristotle’s ontology of life with the claim that “it is precisely the first phenomenological comprehension of life that led to the interpretation of motion and that makes possible the radicalization of ontology” (182). The conflict is at least weakened through Heidegger’s view that life is itself motion and motion in the highest and fullest sense. But this view is in turn rendered problematic by the distinction between kinêsis and energeia in Metaphysics IX (Theta) 6 and by the account of the unmoved mover as pure energeia (“reine Energie,” Heidegger writes), both of which texts Heidegger addresses here in passing. This does not prevent him, however, from finding “in movement and in being-moved the highest form of being” (according to Bröcker’s notes: 324). The reason is that Heidegger interprets energeia and life as still a kind of movement, but a movement that is at the same time pure presence. Thus he characterizes life as “the most genuine presence-at-hand: presence from out of itself and constantly completed and yet not resting, lying there unmoved. Movement (Bewegtheit) and presence” (175). In proceeding to cite the examples from Theta 6, “I have seen and so I see. I have been happy and so am I right now. I have lived it and so live now,” he characterizes entelecheia and energeia as “being only in a working” (nur im Wirken seiend). As he expresses it later, “ἐντελέχεια: movement and yet not only that, but what is in it” (181).

If Heidegger approves of the translation of energeia as Wirklichkeit (322), it is because this word expresses both the connection to “working” and the connection to being “real” in the sense of “present-at-hand.” When it comes to the “unmoved mover,” Heidegger characterizes its pure energeia as “pure independent constant presence from out of itself. A being to whose being and essence doing (Tun) as such belongs” (178). The guideline here for Heidegger’s reading, despite the return to De Anima and the ontology of life, remains what it has been since 1922: “Being: Being-produced; Being: producing, being: pure doing as such” (172). It is because being is understood as being-produced that it is understood as presence: “What is produced should be present at hand. Being: presence” (162). Therefore, Heidegger continues to affirm here the thesis that Greek ontology is “an ontology of the world” (313). As for the phenomenon of life, Heidegger is reported as insisting that the life of Dasein “is not mere ζωή, but βίος, ‘existence’” (312). The gulf between “Dasein” and “mere life” persists.

The SS1927 Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Basic Problems of Phenomenology): Published as Gesamtausgabe 24

What this course adds to Heidegger’s reading is an important discussion of Aristotle’s concept of time in the Physics: something that was promised for the third division of part 2 of Being and Time but was never published. While Heidegger’s interpretation here ends up attributing to Aristotle the conception of time as an objectively present series of objectively present “nows” which he characterized as the “vulgar” concept of time in Being and Time, he also insists that Aristotle’s “definition” of time as “the number of motion with respect to before and after” (ἀριθμὸς κινήσεως κατὰ τὸ προτερὸν καὶ ὕστερον, 219b2) is not really a “definition” strictly speaking, but only a way of accessing our ordinary experience of time (362). The way in which we ordinarily experience time is, of course, not as a “sequence of nows.” There are two aspects of Heidegger’s interpretation of the “definition” that in particular have it point to a deeper experience of time. First, he embraces the circularity of translating proteron and husteron as “earlier” and “later,” arguing that the counting of motion is possible only in retaining what came earlier and anticipating what is to come (348–349). The definition thus gives us access to an experience of temporality as a retaining-anticipating-in-making-present. Secondly, Heidegger interprets the “now” with which we count motion as having dimension, being stretched from past to future, rather than being a “point” outside of which, and on the two sides of which, are found past and future (351–355). This conception of time as an anticipating-retaining-stretch is clearly at odds with the conception of time as a series of “nows.” What we have here is a typical Heideggerian “destruction”: destroying the doctrine about time Aristotle’s “definition” has given rise to in liberating the experience of time from which this “definition” itself arose.

SS1928 Seminar on Physics III: Only Partially Published in Gesamtausgabe 83

That Heidegger returns to Physics III shortly after the publication of Being and Time shows the significance of this text for him. The return is philosophically motivated. Heidegger in Being and Time did not hide the fact that “the movedness of occurrence in general” (“Bewegtheit des Geschehens überhaupt,” 389), that is, the occurrence of Dasein and therefore of the world and of innerworldly beings, remained an “ontological enigma” (“ontologische Rätsel”). The present seminar is a response to this enigma in that what it seeks from Aristotle’s account of kinêsis is an understanding of the motion that constitutes Dasein’s being: what Heidegger will call “absolute motion” (see GA83, 261) and claims to be “a presupposition, not only for the understanding of motion, but for the understanding of being overall” (WP3, 21). What is pursued here is an ontology of motion, no longer simply in the sense of an account of the being of motion, but rather now in the sense of an account of the motion of being. That Heidegger in the last class (missing from the Gesamtausgabe) turns to Metaphysics IX (Theta) 6 is also highly significant: What he finds now in the notion of energeia as distinguished from kinêsis is the absolute, complete motion of Dasein itself along with its peculiar temporality (what Heidegger calls “this peculiar perfect” of I have seen in still seeing: WP3, 31). Throughout the seminar Heidegger has been drawing our attention not to the time within which motion occurs, but to the time or temporality of motion itself and, ultimately, of that “absolute motion” that is Dasein itself and that grounds our understanding of being. It is this motion of Dasein itself with its temporality that he sees as “shining through” in the passage from Metaphysics IX 6.

This seminar is significant in yet another way: Here Heidegger considers the possibility that his thesis that the Greeks (and therefore Aristotle) understood being as presence (and therefore from the perspective of production) might not hold, at least not unqualifiedly. Considering a passage in the Physics (201a31–b3) where Aristotle clearly distinguishes “being capable” (of being healthy or sick) from what is present at hand beneath these capabilities (the hypokeimenon), Heidegger must acknowledge that Aristotle is clearly distinguishing here between “being-capable” and “being-present” and is certainly not reducing the former to the latter. On the contrary, since it is only the possibility of being capable of contrary things that requires us to postulate something present at hand that remains the same beneath capabilities, the implication appears to be that the understanding of ousia as the presence of what is present at hand is grounded ( fundiert, WP3, 7) in the distinct understanding of being as being-capable (dunamei on). This appears to Heidegger as “a breach in ancient ontology” (WP3, 7), that is, we should add, a breach in his interpretation of ancient ontology. As we saw especially clearly in the SS1926 course, Heidegger interprets being in the sense of dunamis and energeia as dependent on being in the sense of the categories, that is, ousia, with the latter interpreted as presence. Yet Heidegger emphatically closes the breach in a subsequent class by insisting, as he did in SS1924, that in Aristotle’s definition of motion as the energeia (or entelecheia: the two are not distinguished here) of what is capable as capable, energeia can only mean “presence”; thus the being of motion, as well as the being of what is capable (dunaton), is interpreted as presence. There is no breach. Indeed, no such breach is allowed since “The assumption on which our entire interpretation depends is that energeia and being in general signify for Aristotle presence [Anwesenheit]” (GA83, 254).

WS1928–29 Seminar Die ontologischen Grundsätze und das Kategorienproblem (The Ontological Fundamental Principles and the Problem of the Categories): Unpublished

This seminar contains Heidegger’s only detailed reading of Metaphysics IV (Gamma) on the principle of noncontradiction. The aim here is neither to critique the principle nor show its limitations. On the contrary, Heidegger seeks to ground it in Dasein’s own way of being. He therefore rejects both opposed characterizations of it as a logical or an ontological principle, seeing it instead as an “existential” principle. Specifically, the principle is grounded in Dasein’s making-present. When the principle asserts that something cannot be and not be X “simultaneously” (hama), the hama refers not to some copresence at a point in time, but rather to Dasein’s own temporality: Dasein cannot make present something as being X together with (hama) presenting it as being not-X. Unfortunately, the seminar ends before Heidegger can develop this interpretation of the hama. This is unfortunate because on Heidegger’s own reading, the hama must point to an understanding of time that is not that defined in the Physics. We should recall here, though Heidegger does not, the significance of the hama in the distinction between energeia and kinêsis in Metaphysics IX 6: I cannot hama be building and have built, but I can hama be seeing and have seen. It would be nonsensical to understand the hama here as “at the same point in time.”

A 1932 lecture, “Der Satz vom Widerspruch,” based on the WS1928–29 seminar, has been published in two drafts along with related notes in GA91. The shorter account of Metaphysics IV in this lecture is clearly based on the more detailed account in the seminar and does not really add anything to it.

SS1931 Course Aristoteles, Metaphysik IX, 1–3: Vom Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Kraft (Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, 1–3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force): Published as Gesamtausgabe 33.

As already noted, this course is a reading of the first three chapters only of Metaphysics IX.Footnote ²⁹ This restriction is intentional, as Heidegger claims that the entire book can be interpreted from out of the initial chapters. This means that in Heidegger’s view the notions of dunamis and energeia can be fully interpreted and understood in relation to motion, which is the relation at issue in these early chapters, despite Aristotle’s own claim that these are not the senses of dunamis and energeia most useful to him in the present context (ontology) and his announcement of a transition to a different sense not relative to motion at the start of chapter 6. Here chapter 6 and its distinction between energeia and kinêsis are completely ignored by Heidegger. This is arguably what enables him to interpret the argument of the book, and specifically Aristotle’s debate with the Megarians, as presupposing a conception of being not as “activity,” but as presence. In a way that firmly prevents “the breach in ancient ontology” confronted in the SS1928 seminar, Heidegger insists that what is at issue in this debate is the being-present of what is dunaton (see especially 167). In this context, it should also be noted that the thesis that for the Greeks “being=being-produced” is just as dominant here as it has been in Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle since 1922 (see 224, 381). This is the case even though Heidegger, in his discussion at the start of the course of the manifold senses of being in Aristotle, claims to leave open and question-worthy what unifies this manifold and what kind of unity this is (47).

1939 Essay “Vom Wesen und Begriff der Φύσις: Aristoteles, Physik B, 1” (“On the Essence and Concept of Φύσις: Aristotle, Physics B, 1”): Published in Wegmarken

As already noted, the focus of the essay is much more limited than that of the WS1923–24 seminar. It is dedicated entirely to the first chapter of Book II of the Physics. Heidegger expresses here again the conviction that has made the Physics central to his reading of Aristotle from the beginning: “The Aristotelian ‘Physics’ is the hidden and therefore never adequately thought-through fundamental book of Western philosophy” (WB, 312). This is because he continues to understand being-moved as “the fundamental way of being” (314), though as such, being-moved cannot be understood here ontically as a motion, but rather as “movedness” (Bewegtheit): the same word used in Being and Time for the movedness that is Dasein’s being. As for energeia, in an implicit reference to the example of “having seen and still seeing” in Metaphysics IX 6, Heidegger speaks of “the highest movedness (Bewegtheit) in the rest of (simple) seeing gathered within itself ” (354). As for entelecheia, it is “the essence of κίνησις” (357). With the interpretation of being as movedness, Heidegger continues to claim that the Greeks interpreted being in terms of production and thus as presence. However, a significant shift appears to take place here: first, Herstellen is distinguished from “making” (Machen) and understood as a letting-come-forth broader than production; secondly, presence is understood now verbally (Anwesen, presencing) and therefore distinguished from “mere presence-at-hand” (342).

WS1942–43 Seminar on Metaphysics IX 10: Unpublished

This extraordinary seminar appears to have been completely forgotten. No published list of Heidegger’s courses and seminars contains it, with one confusing exception: A list compiled by Heidegger himself around 1945 and published in GA86 lists a seminar on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, but for the summer semester of 1943 as well as the summer semester of 1944 (893). The table of contents of GA86 informs us that a protocol for a WS 42/43 seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Part II) is to be found on p. 683. But if we turn to that page, what we find is the protocol of a Hegel seminar in SS1943, with the first class held on May 6, 1943, and therefore nothing of the WS1942–43 seminar that was in fact on Aristotle. That seminar was meant as an excursus between the first seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology in SS1942 and the second seminar on the Phenomenology in SS1943, the excursus being justified by Heidegger’s usual insistence that understanding Hegel requires returning to Aristotle. Probably because it was such an excursus, though a long and very substantial one, it has been overlooked. The only indication of the very existence of the seminar was the publication of notes taken by the Romanian phenomenologist Alexandru Dragomir for only one class held on January 14, 1943 (Dragomir Reference Dragomir2004). Yet protocols exist for the seminar that were reviewed and corrected by Heidegger himself (75.7160). While the authors of the protocols are not identified, the fact that the protocol for January 14 is identical to Dragomir’s published notes shows that he was one of them.

What makes the seminar extraordinary is, in part, that while Heidegger had already given readings of Metaphysics IX, 10,Footnote ³⁰ drawn to it because of its identification of the most genuine or most ruling sense of being with being-true, the reading here provides radically different translations/interpretations that emphasize a conception of being as the movement of presencing (Anwesung)/unconcealing rather than as constant presence (beständige Anwesenheit). In this context, Heidegger gives an account of Aristotle’s definition of motion in the Physics fundamentally different from that provided in SS1924: He now insists that the presence of the wood in the carpenter’s shop is not motion and he translates entelecheia/energeia in the definition not as Gegenwart, but as Beistellung.Footnote ³¹ But even more important is the part of the seminar not announced in its title. The culmination of Metaphysics IX, 10 in the truth of simple beings existing only in energeia leads Heidegger to Metaphysics IX, 6 with the goal of elucidating this sense of being. The reading he gives of this latter text must surprise anyone familiar with his reading in the 1924–25 seminar and especially his nonreading in the SS1931 course: emphasizing more than ever the distinction between energeia and kinêsis (and now finding this distinction in the first sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics), he claims that while energeia/dunamis can be understood from kinêsis, their essence reaches beyond kinêsis and can be fully understood only from the being of life. Heidegger then turns to a detailed translation/interpretation of De Anima I, 1 because Aristotle there claims that the study of the soul, as the principle of living things, contributes greatly to the study of all truth (or, in Heidegger’s translation, “unconcealment as a whole”). Heidegger reaches this important conclusion: “The kuriôs on [being in the prevalent sense], for this indeed is being in the manner of dunamis and energeia, points to zoê [life]. What shows itself here is a fundamental connection between being and life that, already anticipated by Plato, runs through and dominates the whole of metaphysics.” With that, Heidegger returns to Hegel in the next semester. The suggestion that Aristotle’s fundamental ontological concepts, and indeed his conception of the prevalent sense of being, are arrived at from the phenomenon of life is significant because it supports an interpretation we saw Heidegger dismiss in the 1922 “Natorp Bericht”: that the meaning of being that in the end characterizes the being of human life is genuinely derived by Aristotle from a pure fundamental experience of precisely this object and its being.

SS1944 Seminar on Metaphysics IV 1–3 and the Early Chapters of Book VII: Published in Gesamtausgabe 83

The discussion of both texts has the same aim: to expose a fundamental ambiguity in Aristotelian ontology. In the description of a science of “being insofar as being” in Metaphysics IV, the phrase is ambiguous between verbal (be-ing insofar as be-ing) and nominative meanings (a being insofar as it is a being), as well as between the meaning of being in general and that of the being that most corresponds to the concept of being (see 162, 386, 419). In the case of the discussion in Metaphysics VII of ousia, identified with the primary sense of being in Book IV, this term is ambiguous between the things that count as ousia and what ousia itself is (418, 439). These points are not new in Heidegger’s reading. What appears to be new is the diagnosis of these ambiguities as a failure to raise the question of being, a failure that constitutes the origin of metaphysics as “the overshadowing of being through beings [das Seiende] pressing for objectification and ultimate anthropomorphism” (162). Heidegger describes himself as simply pursuing here the destruction of the history of ontology that was projected for the second part of Being and Time (420), but the “destruction” seems more negative than before. Even Aristotle’s account of truth as the most genuine sense of being in Metaphysics IX 10 is now only “the afterglow [Nachglanz] of truth as unconcealment” (436). Heidegger appears to have intended to discuss the principle of noncontradiction in Metaphysics IV, which he calls the most puzzling principle of Western philosophy (395), but he never gets to it. Therefore, while here, as in the WS1928–29 course, he claims that the principle should be interpreted neither “logically” nor “ontologically” (470), we do not get here, as we do in the earlier course, the positive alternative.

WS1950–51 Seminar “On Causality”: Published in Gesamtausgabe 83

This reading of Aristotle along with Kant focuses on the Physics. Almost thirty years after his first interpretation of this text, Heidegger still insists that it, and not the Metaphysics, is the central text of Western metaphysics (477). Indeed, he states even more forcefully his view that being-moved is an ontological predicate extending to all beings and that “nature” (phusis), rather than referring to a particular region of being, is, as the cause of movedness, the nature of being itself. But an important development, anticipated in the 1939 essay and in WS1942/43, that starts from his verbalizing of Anwesenheit as Anwesen (presencing) is the understanding of ontological movement as the movement of presencing itself (zum Anwesen selbst die Bewegung gehört, 484): Heidegger claims this to be Aristotle’s decisive advance over Plato. Of great importance to Heidegger here is a sentence from the second chapter of Physics I: “Let it be established by us that the things that are according to phusis are either all or some in motion (ἡμῖν δ᾽ὑποκείσθω τὰ φύσει ἢ πάντα ἢ ἔνια κινούμενα εἶναι). This is evident from induction” (185a12–13). He even claims the sentence to be “one of the greatest accomplishments ever carried out in the history of thought” (486)! Yet to get the sentence to say what he wants it to say, Heidegger must dismiss the “or some,” first refusing to consider it (487) and then, when apparently challenged by some participants in the course, insisting that “There is in the ἔνια [some] no restriction of the ontological generality of the statement” (489). Furthermore, he must interpret the “all in motion” as meaning, not that all things are in motion, but that motion belongs to the very being=presencing of what is=is present (486; see also 494). This idea of the motion of presencing is in any case an important development, since earlier the presence identified with being was understood as a static being-present-at-hand that results from, or is the product of, movement. This is presumably why Heidegger further breaks from, or transforms, the thesis that being is understood in terms of production: while he continues to see poiêsis as paradigmatic, he now insists that it is not “‘making’ in the sense of manufacturing [Anfertigen], but in the completely general sense of ‘bringing forth’ (Hervorbringen)” (502). The rejection here of the term Anfertigen is significant given Heidegger’s constant use during the 1920s of the words fertig and Fertigkeit to express the understanding of being derived from the model of production. But this understanding of poiêsis as “bringing-forth” makes it only easier to identify phusis with poiêsis, which Heidegger does (see especially 209).

SS1951 Seminar on Physics II 1 and III 1–3: Published in Gesamtausgabe 83

The Physics is now “the watershed in the fluvial land of Western thinking” (206; see also 209). This is because Heidegger remains of the view that “‘being-in-motion’ is being in the genuine sense” (529). But Heidegger is here even more forceful than before in insisting that motion not to be understood in an ontic sense. It would be an absurdity to say that Aristotle understood ousia as kinêsis. Heidegger asserts that instead ousia is energeia and that the essence of the latter has nothing to do with motion; he even goes so far as to call energeia a ‘static concept’ (542). Yet all this is said in support of a thesis that is not at all new to Heidegger’s reading: that the Greeks, including Aristotle, understood being as being-present-at-hand and from the perspective of poiêsis, though Heidegger again insists that this word is to be understood in a “completely broad sense”: “(‘Herstellung’, ‘Hervorbringung’),” 506. If in discussing the four meanings of being (categories, “coincidental,” truth, and dunamis/energeia), he claims that they all presuppose an understanding of being as presence-at-hand, he is not saying anything he did not say in the SS1926 course. There already, as we have seen, he interpreted the primary meaning of being according to the categories, that is, ousia, as presence-at-hand, with the other categories being different modalities of being-present-at-hand-with; he took the other three meanings of being as dependent on this first meaning (with dunamis and energeia being modes of ousia). Yet Heidegger’s reading appears here to be even more extreme and reductive. This is evident in his claim, not found in the earlier course, that “in all four ways [of being] the ὑποκείμενον remains determinative” (550). The word hypokeimenon has the sense of “what lies there before” and therefore is easily identified by Heidegger with being-present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit). What makes Heidegger’s thesis extreme is not just that it has the effect of reducing what Aristotle insists are four distinct meanings of being to one, but that it identifies this meaning with a notion, the hypokeimenon, that Aristotle explicitly rejects as inadequate even for capturing the meaning of ousia (in Metaphysics VII, 3). What we have here is less a development of Heidegger’s interpretation than its hardening and simplification.

WS1951–52 Seminar on Physics III and Metaphysics IX 10: Published in Gesamtausgabe 83

This final seminar on Aristotle does not break new ground, but rather returns to and recapitulates key features of Heidegger’s reading going back decades. The Physics remains for Heidegger the central work of Aristotle’s ontology because, while he clarifies again that ousia cannot be identified with kinêsis (how could it be if it is to be understood as Vorhandenheit?), it is still with a view to kinêsis that the meaning of ousia is determined (558); furthermore, Heidegger continues to identify phusis with being as such, even though in this seminar he receives some pushback on this point from Ernst Tugendhat (559–562). In returning to Metaphysics IX 10, Heidegger provides a reading very much in line with his reading of WS1925–26, though with an emphasis now on the verbal sense of “presencing” that he first introduces into this text in WS1942–43: Anwesung rather than beständige Anwesenheit. “Truth” is the most genuine sense of being because being is presence, and that which is present can presence (an-wesen) only in an open or undisclosed region: a-lêthes (596); thus Heidegger can again take chapter 10 to be the highpoint of the book, rather than an addendum (656–7). There is no further discussion of Metaphysics IX, though Heidegger’s more “static” conception now of the pair energeia/entelecheia is evident in his interpretation of the latter as “the pure presence of something completed in itself and so persisting in itself ” (595). No hint of activity here! As for the term energeia itself, Heidegger, ignoring the identification of energeia with action ( praxis) at the end of IX (Theta) 6, something he emphasized in WS1942–43, instead identifies it with a phrase earlier in that chapter, huparchein to pragma, “the obtaining of a thing” (1048a31), and thus with being-present-at-hand. Along the same lines, Heidegger, in returning to Aristotle’s account of time, now asserts in a more unqualified way than before that for Aristotle “time” just means “now” (649). A puzzle of these later seminars is that, while we have seen Heidegger broaden the notion of Herstellung to mean a “bringing-forth” and verbalize “presence” into “presencing,” he appears to become even more unqualified than before in insisting that the Greeks, and therefore Aristotle, reduced being to being-present-at-hand and accordingly time to the “now.” Perhaps the reason is that the goal now is less to appropriate Aristotle philosophically in a positive way than to tell a story about the history of metaphysics. This might explain why so much of the seminar is devoted to Descartes and Kant, with the explanation that “Now, we are no longer Greeks, i.e., we can reconstruct their thinking only in contrast to our own manner of thinking. It is therefore necessary first to secure these questions from our standpoint” (575; also 585).

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In total, we have thirteen courses or seminars in which Aristotle is the exclusive focus; four in which he is a major focus; six in which one of his texts receives extensive discussion.Footnote ³² In addition, we have the 1939 essay, the book proposal, the 1924 and 1932 lectures, and the lecture course that introduced Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretations of Aristotle. It is striking that, despite all this constant reflection on Aristotle spanning three decades, the only interpretation of Aristotle Heidegger published during his lifetime was the 1939 essay. It is also surprising that, despite the many seminars and courses on Aristotle that preceded Being and Time and clearly prepared its conceptual ground, indeed, despite the fact that what Heidegger began writing with the aim of understanding the facticity of human life was a book on Aristotle, Aristotle receives scant mention in Heidegger’s major publication. While there is a passing reference to Aristotle’s account of the pathê, which was a focus in the SS1924 course, as well as a reference to Aristotle’s account of time in the Physics, which we can see not to have been a topic of interest to Heidegger in his reading of Aristotle before Being and Time, there is no acknowledgment of the major debts this work owes to Aristotle. To summarize some of them here: If in Being and Time Heidegger characterizes our being (Dasein) as a being-possible to distinguish it from the being-present of what is “at hand” (vorhanden) or “to hand” (zuhanden), this being-possible is an appropriation of Aristotle’s concept of dunamis, with the “significance” that characterizes Dasein’s world being an interpretation of Aristotle’s dunamei on; the general understanding of Dasein’s “movedness” (Bewegtheit) is derived from the account of kinêsis in Aristotle’s Physics; the analysis of being-in-the-world in terms of dealing with “equipment” is guided by Aristotle’s account of poiêsis; the interpretation of Dasein’s being as care certainly owes more to Aristotle’s notion of praxis than to the Latin fable of “cura” Heidegger actually cites (197–198); the analysis of ‘conscience’ as in its call making Dasein manifest in its ontological and temporal structure owes a clear debt to Aristotle’s account of phronêsis as admitting no lêthê (“forgetfulness”), a debt acknowledged in the SS1923 and SS1924 courses, but not in Being and Time itself, not even in the long note dedicated to prior interpretations of “conscience” (273n3). It is as if Heidegger’s philosophical appropriation of Aristotle in Being and Time was so deep and pervasive as to render any explicit reference to Aristotle otiose. Yet this did not prevent the engagement with Aristotle to continue just as intensely immediately after, and indeed during, the writing of Being and Time and for decades thereafter.Footnote ³³

From this survey we can also identify the Aristotelian texts and parts thereof that received detailed treatment by Heidegger:

1. 1) De Anima I, 1; II, 1–2, 5, 7; III 9

2. 2) Nicomachean Ethics I; II; VI

3. 3) Metaphysics I, 1–2; IV, 1–4; V [isolated chapters]; VII, 1–9; IX, 1–6, 10

4. 4) Physics I, 1–4; II, 1–7; III, 1–2; IV, 10–14

5. 5) Rhetoric I, 1–3; II, 1, 5

6. 6) Parts of Animals I, 1

7. 7) On Interpretation (peri hermêneias), 1–5

Other texts, of course, are cited and briefly discussed throughout Heidegger’s work.

Among the texts that receive detailed treatment by Heidegger, the Physics is clearly and by far the most central to his reading, being the text to which he returns again and again and always as a focus of extensive commentary. The early chapters of Books I and II are of continual interest to Heidegger, while the account of time in Book IV receives substantial attention only in the period immediately surrounding the publication of Being and Time. It is Book III, however, that is at the center of his reading of the Physics. From this we can already gather that the thematic focus of Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, from beginning to end, is being-in-motion. Indeed, Heidegger’s account of our being as a peculiar kind of movement and being-possible in Being and Time appears to be only a passing moment in a reflection on being-in-motion in Aristotle that preceded this work, immediately followed it in the 1928 seminar, and continued to occupy him after the war in the 1950s. One can well understand why Heidegger would tell Thomas Sheehan, as late as 1971, that, along with Husserl’s account of the categorial intuition of being, the other influence at the heart of his thinking was Aristotle’s doctrine of kinêsis in the Physics (Sheehan Reference Sheehan2024, 361). In the context of this continuous focus on the Physics, we see a significant change in the other texts receiving substantial consideration: De Anima, which inaugurated Heidegger’s intense engagement with Aristotle, is soon replaced by the Nicomachean Ethics, which becomes a major focus in the period leading to Being and Time; after Being and Time, however, the Ethics in turn completely disappears from Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle. It is as if, with Being and Time, Heidegger had gotten everything he could get out of Aristotle’s ethics. As for the Metaphysics, it is certainly of secondary interest relative to the Physics, but is always there in Heidegger’s reading, from beginning to end. As in the case of the Physics, Heidegger’s reading of the Metaphysics is very selective. Despite an earlier interest in the first two chapters of Book I and regular references to Book IV, it is Book VII that received the most substantial and continual treatment, with Book IX also being given special importance. This means a focus on the problem of ousia and on the conceptual pair dunamis/energeia.

As for how Heidegger reads Aristotle’s texts, we see that a constant guiding assumption since 1922 is that Aristotle understood being from the perspective of production and therefore as presence. Yet two important points need to be made here. First, we have seen that the understanding of both the terms “presence” and “production” in the thesis undergoes a change after the 1920s, with “presence” being understood more as “presencing” (An-wesen) than as “being-present-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit) and “production” (poiêsis) more as “bringing-forth” (Hervorbringung) than as “making” (Machen). Secondly, Heidegger’s thesis is not simply “critical,” but rather “destructive” in his sense: if a conception of being as “presence” emerges from the productive movement of Dasein, then Aristotle’s thought itself, in placing movement at the heart of the understanding of being, enables us to get beyond the conception of being as presence. The movement of the things we produce and use, and our understanding of what it means for them to be in movement and simply to be, is grounded in the movement that we ourselves are. Through “destroying” Aristotle, we can arrive at a better understanding of this more fundamental (“absolute”) movement in which his own thought is grounded and to which it therefore points. As Heidegger says in one of the later seminars, though in connection to the text On Interpretation which he seeks to free from the tradition of interpretation: “This is what I earlier called ‘Destruction’. One therefore thinks that Heidegger is a destructive man. But the meaning of destruction is coming to the ground [auf den Boden zu kommen]” (GA83, 647). Yet we also see that this “destruction” depends on the mentioned assumption or hypothesis that being for the Greeks equals “being-produced” and therefore presence. If this thesis is being imposed onto Aristotle’s text – and some indication has been given of moments where this is what appears to be taking place – then what it produces is not a liberating “destruction,” but a suppression and occlusion of other possibilities these texts might preserve. The questions that need to be asked here are the topic of the next section.