Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art

Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art

Poiesis in Being

Mark Sinclair

Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art

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Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of ArtPoiesis in Being

Mark Sinclair


© Mark Sinclair 2006

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Sinclair, Mark, 1973–Heidegger,Aristotle, and the work of art : poiesis in being / Mark Sinclair.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 1–4039–8978–8 (cloth)1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976. 2. Art – Philosophy. 3. Aristotle.

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Contents

Acknowledgements vi

Abbreviations and Method of Citation vii

Introduction 1

Part I A Ground-laying of Greek Ontology

1 The Question of Being 19

2 Repeating Metaphysics: Heidegger’s Account of Equipment 47

3 Time and Motion 78

4 The Moment of Truth 111

Part II The Turn to the Work of Art

5 Art and the Earth 135

6 Art, World and the Problem of Aesthetics 168

Conclusion 192

Notes 196

Bibliography 212

Index 218

v


vi

Acknowledgements

My thanks are due, above all, to Keith Crome at Manchester MetropolitanUniversity, whose persistence as a friend, reader and philosophical col-league has greatly improved this book. I am also indebted to UllrichHaase, who commented on early versions of the work in his role as myPhD supervisor and to Mike Garfield for his generous advice in mattersof Ancient Greek.

A version of Chapter 2 first appeared under the title ‘Heidegger’saccount of equipment in Being and Time as metaphysics in its repetition’in the Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2005.Parts of the same chapter not included in this article have also been pub-lished in French under the title ‘Science et Philosophie dans Etre etTemps’ in Noésis, No. 10, Heidegger et les sciences (ed. M. de Beistegui andF. Dastur), 2006.


Abbreviations and Method of Citation

I translate the titles of Aristotle’s texts, but they are cited according tothe standard pagination of the Bekker edition of the collected works(Opera, Berlin, 1831–70). A list of the English editions upon which myown translations are based are to be found in the bibliography. As a rule,key Greek terms are introduced in Greek script, and subsequentlytransliterated or translated except when they appear in citations of otherauthors.

The titles of Heidegger’s texts are always translated in the text butI refer primarily to the German editions in the references. The texts ofthe collected works (Gesamtausgabe, Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt amMain) are cited with the letter G followed by the volume number of thetext, the page number and, if possible, the page number of the Englishtranslation after a forward slash. I have often modified the translations,and for the sake of brevity the English edition is not cited if it indicatesthe pagination of the German edition. Concerning other French orGerman texts, unless a reference to an English edition is provided thetranslations are my own. I refer to the following volumes of theGesamtausgabe:

G3 Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1990). Kant and theProblem of Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, trans. R. Taft, 1997).

G5 Holzwege (1994). Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, trans. J. Young and K. Haynes, 2002).

G7 Vorträge und Aufsätze (2000).G9 Wegmarken (1976). Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, ed. W. McNeill, 1998).G13 Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (1983).G18 Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie (2002).G19 Platon: Sophistes (1992). Plato’s Sophist (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, 1997).G20 Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (1979). History of the

Concept of Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, trans.T. Kisiel, 1992).

vii


G21 Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit (1976).G22 Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie (1993).G24 Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1975). The Basic

Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, trans. A. Hofstadter, 1988).

G26 Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz(1978). The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, trans. M. Heim, 1992).

G29/30 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit(1983). The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, trans. W. McNeill andN. Walker, 1995).

G31 Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Einleitung in die Philosophie(1982). On the Essence of Human Freedom: Introduction toPhilosophy (London: Continuum, trans. T. Sadler, 2002).

G33 Aristoteles: Metaphysik IX. Translated as Aristotle’s Metaphysics 11–3 (1990). On the Essence and Actuality of Force (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, trans. W. Brogan and P. Warnek, 1995).

G39 Hölderlins Hymnen, Germanien “und, Der Rhein” (1980).G54 Parmenides (1982). Parmenides (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, trans. A. Schuwer and R. Rojcewicz, 1992).G56/57 Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (1987). Towards a Definition of

Philosophy (London: Continuum, trans. T. Sadler, 2000).G55 Heraklit (1979).G65 Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1989). Contributions

to Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, trans.P. Emad and K. Maly, 1999).

G66 Besinnung (1997).

I refer to non-Gesamtausgabe editions of Heidegger’s work (with the pagenumber of the corresponding English edition appearing, when bothpossible and necessary, after a forward slash) according to the followingabbreviations:

EM Einführung in die Metaphysik, (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1987, 5thedn). Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt, 2000).

ID Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957). Essays inMetaphysics: Identity and Difference (New York: PhilosophicalLibrary Inc., trans. by K. Leidecker, 1960).

viii Abbreviations and Method of Citation


NI Nietzsche – Vol. 1 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961). Nietzsche – Vols Iand II (New York: Harper & Row, trans. D. F. Krell, 1991).

NII Nietzsche – Vol. 2 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961). Nietzsche – Vols IIIand IV (New York: Harper & Row, trans. D. F. Krell and F. Capuzzi, 1991).

PIA Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige derhermeneutischen Situation). I refer to a bi-lingual German/French edition of this text: Interprétations Phénoménologiquesd’Aristote (Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress, trans. J. F. Courtine,1992). This edition reproduces the text in the Dilthey Jahrbuchfür Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften 6(1989). I refer to the first English translation of this text,‘Phenomenological interpretations with respect to Aristotle’ inMan and World 25 (1992): 358–93, trans. Michael Baur.

S Schelling: Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Tübingen:Niemeyer, 1971). Schelling’s Treatise on Essence of HumanFreedom (Athens: Ohio University Press, trans. J. Stambaugh,1985).

SG Der Satz von Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957). The Principle ofReason (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, trans. R. Lilly,1991).

SZ Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984, 15th edn). Being andTime (Oxford: Blackwell, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson,1995).

UK1 ‘Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerkes: Erste Ausarbeitung’ inHeidegger Studies, Vol. 5, 1989, 5–22.

UK2 ‘Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerkes/De l’origine de l’oeuvre d’art’(Paris: Authentica, 1987).

UK3 I refer to the Gesamtausgabe edition [G5] of ‘Der Ursprung desKunstwerkes’ in this way. I cite the translation of the essay in Offthe Beaten Track after the forward slash but I do not always followit word for word, and I rely heavily on the those of D. F. Krell inBasic Writings (London: Routledge, 1995) and of A. Hofstadterin Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).

VS Vier Seminare (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,1977).

WHD Was Heißt Denken? (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1954). What is CalledThinking? (New York: Harper & Row, trans. F. Wieck andJ. Gray, 1972).

ZSD Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976).

Abbreviations and Method of Citation ix


Since some of Heidegger’s volumes of essays (G7, for example) have nocompletely corresponding English-language edition, I refer to threetranslations with the following abbreviations:

EGT Early Greek Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, trans. D. Krelland F. Capuzzi, 1975).

EP The End of Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, trans. J. Stambaugh, 1973).

QCT The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York:Harper & Row, trans. W. Lovitt, 1977).

x Abbreviations and Method of Citation


Introduction

In the end, if you destroy, let it be with nuptial tools.René Char

This book seeks to contribute to an elucidation of the meaning andpossibility of philosophy in the present age by examining the interpreta-tion of Aristotle that is to be found in the work of the twentieth-centuryGerman philosopher, Martin Heidegger. The aim, in the most generalterms, is to determine the manner in which both a positive appropria-tion and a critique of Aristotle lie at the very heart of Heidegger’sphilosophical enterprise from the early 1920s onwards. This enterprise,however, including the interpretation of Aristotle that is central to it, isradicalised and begins to grasp more fully its own historical implicationsby means of Heidegger’s phenomenological reflection on the essence ofart in the mid-1930s. Such reflection on the essence of art does not formmerely an isolated or special problematic within Heidegger’s work, and,in other words, it is not limited to the significance of what philosophershave come to term a ‘regional ontology’; it rather transforms the basicquestion of philosophy that Heidegger had posed in the 1920s, namelythe question of being. The most specific aim of this study, therefore, isto determine exactly how Heidegger’s phenomenology of the artworktransforms his earlier interpretation of Aristotle articulated within aquestioning of being, and ultimately to show that it is only from theperspective of this transformation that the historical and philosophicalimport of Heidegger’s earlier work, and thus the development of hiswork as a whole, can be adequately understood.

This schematic delimitation of the aims of the book may do little toavert the impression produced by its title that it will offer a comparativestudy of the theory of art and of the determination of being articulated

1


by both Aristotle and Heidegger. It would seem, in terms that are usedhere in a provisionally indiscriminate fashion, that the study will com-pare the ‘metaphysics’ and ‘aesthetics’ of both Heidegger and Aristotle.To this end, and according to one accepted method of such a comparativestudy, it would be necessary initially to present the ideas of Aristotle – firstcome, first served – concerning the subjects in question before describingthose of Heidegger. A concluding section of the book would then ventureto ascertain exactly how the ideas of these philosophers differ, andperhaps even how the ideas of Heidegger represent a philosophicaladvance, if advances can be made in philosophy, on those of Aristotle.This somewhat simplistic conception of the aims and method of thestudy, although not entirely false, would be troubled, however, by thefact that Heidegger himself offers an interpretation, different interpreta-tions, of Aristotle. The lecture courses published in Heidegger’s collectedworks over the last three decades have revealed the extent of his concernfor a ‘phenomenological interpretation’ of Aristotle in the 1920s. Notonly do we have to deal, therefore, with Aristotle and Heidegger, but withAristotle, Heidegger and, third, Heidegger on Aristotle. Yet what furthercomplicates such a simplistic conception of our study is the fact thatHeidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle is no mere historical adjunct toa modern, self-contained or systematic philosophy, but is instead integralto his own thinking. This is at least indicated by the fact that the text ofBeing and Time, Heidegger’s magnum opus of 1927, emerges not only fromthe aforementioned lecture courses offering ‘phenomenological interpre-tations’ of Aristotle, but also, and more immediately, from an unrealisedproject to extend these interpretations in the form of a book-length work.It might be thought that something decisive occurred for Heidegger notto have realised this extended Aristotle interpretation and to have writtenBeing and Time instead. Nevertheless, it will become clear in what followsthat any attempt to separate crudely the main lines of Heidegger’s ‘own’work regarding metaphysics and aesthetics from his interpretation ofAristotle is problematic.

A sense of this problem, and that is to say, an initial understanding ofthe significance of Heidegger’s Aristotle interpretation and of the mannerin which this interpretation inheres in his work of the 1920s, can begleaned from the introductory sections of Being and Time. The very firstpages of the text indicate that it has something other than a simply inci-dental or accidental relationship to the work of Aristotle and to that ofPlato before him. The question of being that it is necessary to ‘restateexplicitly’ in the face of contemporary philosophical indifference tobeing and to the meaning of being itself, was a question that ‘provided

2 Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art


a stimulus for the researches of Plato and Aristotle, only to subside fromthen on as a theme for actual investigation’ [SZ 2]. Heidegger’s claim is thatthe ‘fragmentary and incipient’ determination of being that is to be foundin the work of both Plato and Aristotle is one that has ‘become trivialized’[SZ 2], taken for granted and no longer even seen as an issue, in the historyof philosophy after its Greek inception. Such opening remarks, howeverequivocal they may be, already seem to propose a return to the thinkingof both Plato and Aristotle as a return to the living source of an ossifiedphilosophical tradition, a source that would provide resources for thearticulation of the question of the meaning of being.

These remarks are developed, of course, in §6 of the text, which delin-eates ‘The Task of Destroying the History of Ontology’, a task that was to becarried out in a projected second part of Being and Time that remained,in the event, unpublished. It should be noted, first of all, that the neces-sity of what Heidegger advances as an ‘ontological destruction’ withinthe philosophical project of Being and Time lies in the finitude, in thehistorical situation of all thought. The simple but nonetheless decisivefact that in the seventeenth century Descartes takes up the conceptual-ity of medieval philosophy, which itself derives from Greek philosophy,constitutes a preliminary indication that any attempt, even the mostradical, to begin thinking philosophically from nothing but a blankslate will be pervaded by traditional concepts and traditional angles ofapproach. Descartes, famously, first attempts in philosophy to ‘demolisheverything completely and start again right from the foundations’,1 butin the edifice constructed on the site of this demolition there is muchmore of the tradition than he cares to recognise. For Heidegger, this tes-tifies to the fact that thinking always has a site in history from which itinevitably inherits a past that is always ‘more or less explicitly grasped’[SZ 21]. Moreover, it is the definitively modern attempt to found philos-ophy in and for itself independently of the tradition that exacerbates analready quite traditional tendency to ‘fall prey’ to the past, and that is tosay, to adopt the concepts inherited from the past unthinkingly and asself-evident, with neither the concern nor the ability to return to thesources from which they issued. Accordingly, Heidegger formulates thetask of his ontological destruction in the most succinct manner thus:

If the question of being is to have its own history made transparent,then this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the conceal-ments that it has brought about must be dissolved. We understandthis task as one in which by taking the question of being as our clue, weare to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we

Introduction 3


arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our firstways of determining the nature of being – ways which have guided usever since [SZ 22].

The determination of being within the philosophical tradition is to beinterrogated and shown to be fragwürdig or question-worthy, even andperhaps precisely where it is not explicitly posed as a question. Yet thisloosening up of what is an ossified philosophical tradition seeks toachieve, in the end, a destruction of the ‘traditional content’ of ancientontology. Ultimately, Heidegger seeks, in other words, to advance adecidedly untraditional reading of the Greeks, of Plato and Aristotle, inshowing how the tradition only conceals the originality of the problematicthat underlies their thinking.

Within such destruction, Heidegger’s concern for Greek thinking is,indeed, largely limited to the work of Plato and Aristotle, to what can beunderstood as the inception of philosophy, if it is true that whatPlato baptises as something new with the name philosophy is a funda-mentally different form of thought to those that had preceded it.2

Notwithstanding the occasional reference to Parmenides and Heraclitus,to a certain extent in the 1920s, Heidegger seems to accept the commoncharacterisation of the pre-Socratic thinkers as those who have not yetattained the height and rigour of the work of either Plato or Aristotle.The work of the latter would represent the ‘scientifically highest andpurest stage’ of ‘ancient ontology’ [SZ 26]. Of course, denominating, asHeidegger does, the quite different bodies of work written by Plato andAristotle with the terms ‘ancient ontology’ is problematic. Yet, it is notillegitimate, since, as Heidegger had argued in 1922, for all that Aristotle‘gains a principally new basis in his Physics’ for philosophical research,this research that is motivated by reflection on the possibility of move-ment nevertheless remains the ‘concrete refinement’ [PIA 33/373] ofwhat had gone before, that is, of Plato’s thought. On this account,Aristotle’s thinking represents the summit of Greek philosophy, and foras much as its limits determine the entirety of the history of philosophy,it nevertheless contains an originality unheeded by the tradition. Theclaim is that whilst Aristotle establishes ontology or metaphysics as weknow it, his thought nevertheless exceeds the tradition that he founds.Such a claim might lead us to suspect, and rightly so as I will show, thatHeidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle ultimately concerns not merelywhat one particular philosopher happened to find in the workof another but instead the limitations and the essential possibilities ofmetaphysics itself.



The fact that Heidegger’s ontological destruction is advanced as adestruction of the traditional content of ancient ontology means that if theterm destruction is to be understood partially in a negative sense, thenthis ‘negative’ moment is directed more towards the present age and theunderstanding that it has of its own Greek origins than it is to these Greekorigins themselves; ‘its criticism is aimed at “today” and at the prevalentway of treating the history of ontology’ [SZ 22]. Heidegger’s ‘destruction’is not to be confused with Descartes’ ‘demolition’. Of course, in makingmanifest an untraditional originality of the Greek ontological problem-atic, Heidegger will at the same time criticise, which is to say, determinethe limitations of this problematic. In this sense, the task is one of ‘dis-criminating the basis and the limitations of the ancient science of being’[SZ 26]. Such critique is in no way simply a negation of the past, and it isalways intended as a critique of the present age and the contemporaryinheritance of the limits of Greek ontology. The more obviously ‘positive’aspect of this destruction, however, consists of the attempt to unearth theoriginal experiences at the inception of Greek ontological, philosophicalconceptuality, and it is what is described as ‘a demonstration of the originof our basic ontological concepts by an investigation in which their“birth certificate” is displayed’ [SZ 22].

This notion of a philosophical ‘birth certificate’ (Geburtsbrief ) finds itsown origin in the work of Kant. At the beginning of the transcendentalanalytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes that the analytic ofconcepts must search for a priori concepts in the faculty of the under-standing ‘as their place of birth (als ihrem Geburtsorte)’.3 In taking up andtransforming this notion, Heidegger only emphasises the distance thatseparates him from Kant and the radicality of his own approach. The birth-place of our philosophical concepts is not to be found in an a-historicalintellectual faculty, but rather, and rather more literally, in ancient Greekphilosophy and, more specifically, in the Greek experience of beings. Thedistinction between Greek experience and conceptuality is, in fact, thevery crux of Heidegger’s historical thinking, the epicentre, as it were, ofthe shock that the tradition receives in its destruction. To varying degreesand in different ways, Heidegger is concerned to unearth the pre-thematic horizons of experience that underlie the formation of Greekontological concepts. There would be a difference, or a certain distance,between the horizons of experience at the origins of Greek philosophicalconcepts and what was explicitly thought and reflected on by theGreek philosophers with those concepts. What is implicit would heredetermine what is said explicitly, without the formative power ofwhat is implicit having been explicitly recognised. It is, therefore, only in

Introduction 5


retrieving the sense of these original horizons of experience that we canbe sure of the sense of the philosophical concepts that we have inheritedfrom the Greeks. If our modes of thought and conceptuality have to bevalidated or certified, then ‘only by means of this destruction can ontol-ogy fully assure itself in a phenomenological way of the genuine characterof its concepts’ [G24 31/23].

Such a ‘destructive’ interpretation of Greek philosophy, and of Aristotlein particular, is integral to Heidegger’s thinking, as we have seen,because of the historically rooted nature of thinking and of philosophyitself. Of course, the fact that philosophy has always inherited conceptsand ways of thinking from the tradition that has preceded it, howeverunthinkingly or inauthentically, might appear to be merely a fact, andhence something of which we could doubt the necessity. Yet it is a factthat has its ground in what Heidegger terms the human being’s facticity.Philosophy is historical in its essence, it thinks from within history andcannot legitimately stake a claim to an eternal truth that would havedescended from an otherworldly sphere, because Heidegger argues thatthe human being, as what he terms Dasein, is a being that is in itsessence time. In revealing a temporality thought beyond time conceivedas a series of now-points – nows that are no longer, a now, and nows thatare not yet – the second division of Being and Time shows at once thathistory is not given as an object for an a-historical gaze. The possibilityof any thematic reflection on history, any historiological inquiry(Historie) is given in Dasein’s historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) as the ever pre-objective movement of temporality or history itself. The past, on thisaccount, is that which is accessible only to an interpretation grounded inhistory, in the present and through our openness to the future. In con-trast to the very ‘ideal’ of historical objectivity, that is, a-historical objec-tivity, on the part of the historian, the past, for Heidegger, is that whichcan be brought to expression only through a historically rooted inter-pretation. Any supposed objective enquiry into the history of philoso-phy can, at best, only read the obviousness and ‘self-evidence’ accordingto which it has assumed traditional concepts back into the inception ofphilosophy itself and, at worst, it can perceive in the history of philoso-phy, however much it has finally resulted in the truth, only the historyof an error, ‘mere darkness’ [G24 174/124]. Hence if contemporarythought is to make a genuine advance on the tradition by taking a stepbackwards to the origins of this tradition itself, then this step backwardscan only be achieved through and with the step forwards; the past fromout of which we think has to be re-appropriated and interpreted anew.In order to certify the birth of philosophy, in order to gain a guarantee



as to the genuine character of present-day philosophical concepts, Greekontology has to be repeated, not identically, as if we were simply to saywhat has already been said, but as a productive or creative repetition orWiederholung – literally, a ‘fetching again’ – made possible by the temporaldifference or the hermeneutic distance between the present enquiry andthe past of the tradition itself.4

Heidegger’s ontological destruction, therefore, is already and inalien-ably creative or constructive. It is a function of a historically rooted inter-pretation. Hence destruction, and thus an appropriation of Aristotle, isintegral to Heidegger’s phenomenology not only because our traditionalconcepts require historical certification and validation, but also becausethe birth certification itself requires a phenomenological interpretationof Greek thinking. On this basis, one might even think that far frombeing separable from his interpretation of Aristotle, Heidegger’s work is ina sense identical to it. Some months after the publication of Being andTime, however, in the lecture course of the summer semester of 1927 enti-tled The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger delineates three dif-ferent moments or aspects of the ‘method’ and ‘idea of phenomenology’[G24 26/19]. These three moments, namely reduction, construction anddestruction, together constitute the method and idea of phenomenologyas fundamental ontology, which is the articulation of, and the responseto, the question of the meaning of being. First, the reduction as ‘a prioricognition’ is that in and by which thinking accomplishes the move from abeing to a determination of its being. The analytic of Dasein provided inBeing and Time is such a reduction insofar as it attempts to determine thebeing of the being that we are, namely the human being. Yet, and second,being is not itself a being, it does not stand before our eyes as an object,and hence it must ‘be brought forth in a free projection’ or a construction.To the ‘reductive construction of being’, however, and third, there neces-sarily belongs an ontological destruction. In characterising the unity ofthis threefold, Heidegger writes:

These three basic components of phenomenological method –reduction, construction, destruction – belong together in theircontent and must receive grounding in their mutual inherence[Zusammengehörigkeit]. Construction in philosophy is necessarilydestruction, that is to say, a deconstructing of the traditional carriedout in a historical recursion to the tradition [G24 31/23].

If, as we have seen, ontological destruction is in a certain sense creative,then it is still something other than reduction or construction. The

Introduction 7


‘reductive construction’ of being that is to be found in the text of Beingand Time, in other words, is not an ontological destruction, and yet itbears an inner, organic relationship to the latter. Heidegger announcesthat the determination of this relationship or co-belonging remains as atask to be carried out, and in fact it is one to which he does not returnin the lecture course. This is no accident since it is, in the end, impossi-ble to offer a simple formula that would express the ‘relation’ of each ofthese three moments to each other. They cannot, in fact, be separated inorder to determine subsequently what the relation of each to the othersmight be, and here we should be careful to note that destruction, reduc-tion and construction are not, despite the terms of the passage above,three component parts of a whole, that is, parts able to exist independ-ently of each other. For reduction, construction and destruction corre-spond to the three ‘moments’ or ‘aspects’ of time, namely present,future and past, and as Aristotle recognised, as we will see in Chapter 3of this study, the present, past and future cannot be understood as partsof time.

Despite the difficulty of accounting for the unity of the three aspects ofHeidegger’s method, a method which is in no sense tripartite, it can besaid in general that a reduction, that is, the analytic of Dasein, seeks tothink the problematic originally constitutive of Greek ontology more orig-inally than the Greeks themselves. Heidegger’s fundamental ontology ofthe 1920s is fundamental not only in that it seeks to pose explicitly thequestion of the meaning of being, but also in that it seeks to lay anew andmore originally the foundations of Greek ontology. Curiously, the text ofBeing and Time itself is much less clear than the lecture courses of the 1920sconcerning this second sense of fundamental ontology. This issue willhave to be addressed more fully below, but in certain respects Being andTime has at least the allure of a modern, apparently self-sufficient philo-sophical treatise. Yet stating that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology seeksto rethink Greek ontology ‘more originally than’ the Greeks themselvesmerely marks the site of a problem, our problem, since it is often difficultto separate Heidegger’s ‘own’ thinking from his destruction of the tradi-tional content of Greek ontology. Heidegger’s accounts of what is to befound in the latter undergo a certain development along the path of histhinking from the beginning of the 1920s onwards. It will become clear,in fact, that his historical and hermeneutic interpretations of Aristotlealways allow for the possibility of both a ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ – ora ‘generous’ and ‘less generous’ – repetition, which could emphasiseeither the limits or the originality of Aristotle’s thinking. Moreover, thevery sense of the attempt to think more originally than Aristotle resists



generalisation and each aspect of the problematic of fundamentalontology must be approached in its specificity.

Recognising the bare fact that the analytic of Dasein is intertwinedin an attempt to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontologyshould lead us to adopt, at the very least, a cautious attitude to anyattempt to understand Heidegger’s thinking as a body of work separateor even separable from that of Aristotle. Of course, one may still wonderhow the work of Heidegger is any different in this regard to that of, say,Descartes, Leibniz, Kant or Hegel. Surely, it will be said, the work of thesemodern philosophers cannot be understood adequately without com-prehending how they develop certain key ontological, philosophicalideas first introduced by Aristotle. Yet the difference between Heideggerand these modern philosophers resides in the fact that if the formerclaims to make any advances in philosophy, then these advances aremade possible only by a step back, ein Schritt zurück, to the more or lesshidden sources of the Aristotelian tradition itself. But what, then, isachieved by this step backward? What is it that Heidegger’s phenome-nological ‘birth certificate’ of metaphysics achieves? A response to suchquestions can be found in a passage from Besinnung or Meditation, aposthumously published text written in the period 1938–40, in whichHeidegger despairs at a certain misreading of Being and Time:

And even the attempt to lead this metaphysical thinking in itselfback simply to its own ‘presuppositions’ and thus to initiate from outof itself its self-overcoming (Selbstüberwindung) must fail; for such anattempt [‘Being and Time’] is inevitably once more interpreted meta-physically [G66 211].

Being and Time would have been but an attempt to lead modern meta-physics back to its own presuppositions in preparation for an overcom-ing, a self-overcoming of metaphysics itself. The ‘presuppositions’ atstake here can be understood as the original experiences both veiled byand constitutive of Greek philosophical thinking. Being and Time wouldlead us back to the presuppositions of metaphysics, therefore, insofar asit attempts to expose and think more originally the problematic ofGreek ontology. This means that the text of Being and Time would repre-sent something quite different to a positive philosophical thesis con-cerning being and the human being. It would, in other words, besomething other than one more position or stage within the history ofmetaphysics, another purportedly self-sufficient account of what is assuch and in general, and understanding it thus, however ‘inevitable’

Introduction 9


such understanding may be, would be to understand it metaphysically,in the ‘pejorative’ sense of the term that Heidegger develops in the1930s, precisely insofar as it would fail to perceive the historical nature,and the historical retrocession, inherent in the project of fundamentalontology. Leading back metaphysics to its presuppositions in such amanner, however, would allow for a consequent overcoming of themetaphysical tradition itself. The positive sense of this idea of overcom-ing and self-overcoming will become clear only in the conclusion to thisstudy, but on the basis of the preceding pages it should be clear thatovercoming metaphysics is not an act of discarding it, and that one can-not free oneself from the metaphysical tradition as one can free oneselffrom an opinion. The later Heidegger only appreciates this more, partic-ularly in that he will argue that the apparent redundancy of metaphysicsin the present age is but a function of its realisation in the moderntechno-sciences.

If, in any event, it is true that the fundamental ontology to be foundin Being and Time is an attempt to lead the philosophical tradition backto its own presuppositions, then the text itself presents us with a formi-dable challenge to the ways in which we read and to our inveteratehabits of philosophical thinking. We would have to forego, for example,the language of ‘debts’ and ‘indebtedness’ when discussing Heidegger’srelationship to Aristotle, language which seems to be omnipresent incontemporary scholarship, since such terms, however reasonable andeven correct they may be, are completely inadequate as a means ofunderstanding the peculiar status of Heidegger’s historical thinking.More profoundly, we would have to assess how such historical thinkingexceeds the propriety imposed by the fixing of the proper name‘Heidegger’ to a body of philosophical work. It is by way of such assess-ment or reassessment that we might come to understand how Heideggercould affirm to his French interlocutors at the conference organised inhis honour in 1955 at Cerisy, Normandy, that there is not, and neverwas, such a thing as ‘Heidegger’s philosophy’.

The present book constitutes an attempt at such a reassessment, inso-far as it seeks to understand the transition from Heidegger’s work of the1920s to that of the 1930s as the movement from a ground-laying of thephilosophical tradition, a reduction or leading-back of this tradition toits own presuppositions, to a possible self-overcoming of metaphysicsitself. In showing how Heidegger’s reflection on art is pivotal to it, I aimto demonstrate in what ways and to what extent Heidegger’s work can,and indeed must, be understood according to this movement. Such anapproach requires a reading of Heidegger not only ‘from the start’, but



also ‘from the end,’ and that is to say, retrospectively, from the perspec-tive of the later work. Of course, this approach will appear problematicgiven that, as noted, Being and Time in some respects does indeed seemto adopt the appearance of a self-sufficient philosophical treatise andalso because we are attempting to read this text according to the guidingthread of what Heidegger says about it some ten years after the fact ofwriting it. Yet in accounting for these difficulties I hope to demonstratethe veracity and necessity of the approach.

In the course of the study, I will argue that Heidegger’s interpretationof Aristotle falls, in fact, into not just two, but three distinct periods.Texts such as the pivotal essay of 1922 entitled Phenomenological Interpreta-tions with Respect to Aristotle, and the recently published lecture courseGrundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie [G18], Basic Concepts ofAristotle’s Philosophy, show us that prior to 1925–6 Heidegger hadattempted to retrieve an analysis of ‘factical life’ [PIA 18/359], that is,what he will come to term an analytic of Dasein, from Aristotle’s physi-cal and practical writings. Although Heidegger already speaks of aDestruktion in this period, this retrieval is also termed a ‘dismantlingreturn (abbauender Rückgang)’ [PIA 31/371] in 1922. I use the latter termsin denominating this early period, in order to distinguish it from theproject of fundamental ontology proper and from the destruction that isan essential aspect of the latter. It is necessary to make this distinction,since if Heidegger’s phenomenological thinking is virtually indistin-guishable from his appropriation of Aristotle in the first half of thedecade, then from 1925 to 1926 he moves away from the generosity of hisearlier readings of the Stagirite, and his approach becomes, in general,more critical. As I will show, this movement seems to be occasioned byHeidegger’s discovery of what is termed Dasein’s ‘ecstatic temporality’, atemporality more original than any traditional determination of time asa series of ‘nows’ or present moments, which would constitute the hori-zon for any ‘understanding of being whatsoever’ [SZ 1] and thus eventhe meaning of being itself. For with this discovery of ecstatic temporalityHeidegger argues that the traditional determination of time that itdelimits and supersedes is originally articulated by Aristotle, who wouldaccount for time thus precisely because he was only able to ‘understand’being itself according to one particular moment of time, according tothe present, and thus as presence. This second phase includes the rela-tively lengthy readings of the basic concepts of Aristotle’s physics andmetaphysics presented in lecture courses after Being and Time, such as Onthe Essence of Human Freedom [G31] and Aristotle’s Metaphysics 1 1–3[G33], delivered in 1930 and 1931 respectively. A third phase in this

Introduction 11


interpretative appropriation of Aristotle, however, is introduced in 1935by means of Heidegger’s reflection on the work of art, and attains per-haps its fullest expression in the essay on Aristotle’s Physics, ‘On theEssence and Concept of Phusis’, that Heidegger writes in 1939. As shouldnow be clear, my aim is to show how it is only from the perspective ofthis third phase that Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle as a wholecan be adequately comprehended, and that is to say, comprehended asa movement from a ground-laying of metaphysics to an overcoming ofmetaphysics itself.

For as much as this study advocates the necessity of reading Heideggerbackwards, Part I examines fundamental ontology as a repetition andground-laying of Greek ontology. Chapter 1 examines Aristotle’s ques-tioning of being, with a particular focus on book Zeta of the Metaphysicsand with reference to Heidegger’s interpretations of it. In this manner,the chapter provides an initial account of Heidegger’s attempts todestroy the traditional content of Aristotle’s ontology. The three follow-ing chapters develop this account in showing how the analytic of Daseintakes up the three different but related senses of the ‘ancient’ and, infact, Aristotelian conception of being that are delineated in §6 of Beingand Time: not only would being be conceived in this ontology as pres-ence, but it would also be thought as being-produced, and that is to say,from the perspective of finished products such as tables, chairs and art-works. As we read within Heidegger’s discussion of the idea of enscreatum, the created being, that Descartes inherits from medieval philos-ophy, ‘createdness, in the broadest sense of something having been pro-duced, is an essential structural moment of the ancient conception ofbeing’ [SZ 24]. A third such ‘essential structural moment’, however, is tobe found in the problematic of being as, and in its relation to, truth andlanguage.

Chapters 2–4 of this study, then, each take up one of these threemoments of the ‘ancient conception of being’. Chapter 2 examinesHeidegger’s repetition of Aristotle’s analyses of the particular human com-portment that is poiesis or production, which comportment, as I show inChapter 1, determines the Stagirite’s philosophical account of beings intheir being. Chapter 3 examines Heidegger’s delimitation of Aristotle’saccount of time in the Physics, but only after having shown how thisdelimitation occurs on the basis of an appropriation of Aristotle’s concep-tions of movement within the analytic of Dasein. Chapter 4 concernsHeidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle’s accounts of truth and his relatedanalysis of praxis and prudence. In all of these chapters, I begin from theperspective of fundamental ontology and return to the earlier analyses



of the dismantling return in order to elucidate and assess the former.According to this method, I seek to avoid the partiality of a recent studyby Ted Sadler, which relies on the more negative, critical arguments con-cerning the Stagirite to be found in the texts of the period of funda-mental ontology, in order to claim that Heidegger can be understoodsimply to oppose ‘his own philosophy’ to that of Aristotle.5 In this waySadler seeks to overturn a broad ‘school’ of commentators on the earlyHeidegger – including Robert Bernasconi, John van Buren, TheodoreKisiel, Jacques Taminiaux and Franco Volpi – that has stressed theimportance of Aristotle’s practical writings and anthropology to theproject of fundamental ontology and thus the fact that the text of Beingand Time is much less than transparent concerning the appropriation ofAristotle that is at its heart.

Part II of the study turns to the third phase of Heidegger’s Aristotleinterpretation, one occasioned by reflection on art. The fact that thisreflection is by no means held within the limits of a regional ontology,and thus by extension that it concerns the very essence of Heidegger’sAristotle interpretation, is emphasised in the appendix added in 1956 tothe essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, which was presented as a seriesof lectures in 1936.

The entire essay moves knowingly yet implicitly, along the path ofthe question of the essence of being. Reflection on what art may be iscompletely and decisively directed solely toward the question ofbeing [UK3 73/55].

Heidegger’s reflection on art is directed toward the question of being.This reflection on the poetic or poietic, to use the Greek term here asdenominating more specifically fine art or artistic creation as opposed tomere craftwork, is a reflection on the poietic in being. It is pivotal, in fact,to what Heidegger will famously describe as a turning or Kehre in beingas the matter of thinking, since he writes now not of the meaning, butinstead of the essence or Wesen of being. In order to trace this move-ment, Chapter 5 of the study pays particular attention to the three dif-ferent versions of ‘The Origin’ – a title that I use to name the threeversions collectively – that are now available, offering a genetic study ofthem. I will show how this reflection on art leads beyond fundamentalontology, and concomitantly to a revision of the sense of the three dif-ferent aspects of the ‘ancient’ and Aristotelian conception of beingthat were examined in Part I of the study. This, as I will argue, is a revi-sion that allows us to understand more fully what is revised, namely

Introduction 13


fundamental ontology, as a leading-back of metaphysics to its own pre-suppositions. Particular emphasis will be placed on the manner inwhich it transforms the analysis of equipment provided in the 1920s asa ground-laying of Greek ontology. Chapters 2 and 5, in fact, form thebackbone of the study insofar as they articulate how the transformationin Heidegger’s account of equipment can be understood as a reductionof metaphysics that allows for, and leads to, the possibility of an over-coming of metaphysics as such.

A corollary of this argument will be the claim that the most significantaspect of Heidegger’s Aristotle interpretation is not, in fact, his appro-priation of the Stagirite’s account of praxis and the mode of thoughtproper to it, namely phronesis or prudence. To remain at this level ofanalysis is, I contend, to perceive in Heidegger only a philosopher whois indebted to another philosopher, who happens to be called Aristotle,and who had some interesting ideas concerning human being that wereobscured both in his own work and by the philosophical tradition thatfollowed from it. To perceive fully the significance of Heidegger’s chang-ing appropriations of the Stagirite’s determination of poiesis as denomi-nating both artistic and ‘prosaic’ production is, on the other hand, toapprehend his Aristotle interpretation for what in essence it is: anattempt, at the end of the metaphysical tradition, to delimit the mean-ing and the essential possibilities of metaphysics by thinking throughwhat can be understood to be the highest point of its Greek inception,in such a way as to enable us to think beyond metaphysics itself. In thismanner, I aim to challenge some of the claims of the broad school ofcommentators mentioned above, but in a direction, to be sure, that isdiametrically opposed to that of Sadler. Instead of arguing that Heideggeris, after all, less indebted to Aristotle than we may have come to think,the intention here is to show how the former is ‘indebted’ to the Stagiriteto a degree that renders the idea of ‘indebtedness’ insufficient as a meansof comprehending the historical significance of his thought.

Chapter 5, and also the conclusion, will be concerned to determinehow Aristotle’s own account of the poietic in being provides resources forHeidegger’s attempt, beginning in the 1930s, to delimit the metaphysicaltradition in a manner that is still more radical than that of fundamentalontology. It will be necessary to determine, on the one hand, the extentto which Aristotle belongs to the tradition that he can be understood tofound, and, on the other hand, the extent to which he exceeds it asthinking more originally than those that succeed him. Within thisframework, the final chapter of the study examines Heidegger’s attempt



in the 1930s to locate in the artwork a specific modality of truth, a wayin which truth can occur, and his concomitant critique of the philo-sophical tradition of aesthetics as establishing a divorce of art from anyfunction of truth. The chapter will be concerned to determine whatresources, if any, can be found in Aristotle’s Poietics in order to thinkbeyond the modern aesthetic death of art, a death that can be under-stood to be recorded in the work of Kant, and that is proclaimed explicitlyby Hegel in the nineteenth century.

Only Part II of the study, which comprises Chapters 5 and 6, then, isconcerned directly with the question of the artwork. This approach isnecessary since Heidegger’s reflection on art is, strictly speaking, unin-telligible without a proper understanding of fundamental ontology.Nevertheless, I hope the study will be of interest not only to students ofAristotle and Heidegger, but also to those with a more specific concernfor aesthetics and its history.

Of the existing English-language scholarship concerning Heideggerand Aristotle, it is necessary to situate the present volume in relation tothe three major book-length studies of the two thinkers which haveappeared in English during the last decade. The first, Ted Sadler’sHeidegger and Aristotle: The Question of Being, published in 1996, I havealready mentioned. Notwithstanding some lucid analyses, the study isvitiated by its scant regard to Heidegger’s work both prior to and afterthe years 1927–30 and this facilitates the author’s somewhat superficialclaims concerning Heidegger’s opposition to Aristotle. Catriona Hanley,in her Being and God in Aristotle and Heidegger, published in 2000(Lanham and Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield), seems to pass a similarjudgement on the work of Sadler, and her work is indeed a more even-handed contribution. Hanley’s readings of Aristotle are acute and sharea similar intention to those in the first chapter, in particular, of thisstudy, insofar as she intends to relate Heidegger’s interpretations of keyconcepts in Aristotle to contemporary Aristotelian scholarship. YetHanley’s approach differs to mine in several ways: not only is her focusin relation to the question of being the question of theology, but alsothis approach is pursued according to the avowedly traditional methodof a comparative study, with, in the end, only a minimal concern forHeidegger’s own interpretations of Aristotle, and for what these inter-pretations should lead us to conclude concerning the meaning and pos-sibility of Heidegger’s own thinking. Moreover, Hanley is also concernedalmost exclusively with the Heidegger of the period of fundamentalontology. A year prior to the appearance of Hanley’s work, William

Introduction 15


McNeill published The Glance of an Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle and the Endsof Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press), a text which isnot bound by the same restricted chronological focus. This is a valuablestudy of the question of theory and of the Augenblick, the moment orblink-of-an-eye, in Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle both in the1920s and after the Kehre. If my approach seeks to radicalise, in the man-ner described above in relation to the ‘broad school’ of commentators,McNeill’s study in the areas for which we do have a common concern,then this is only after having been influenced by many of his readings.



Part I

A Ground-laying of GreekOntology


1The Question of Being

This introductory chapter of the study examines Aristotle’s articulationof the question of being on the basis of a reading of book Zeta of theMetaphysics. Of the disparate texts collated under the title of Metaphysics,book Zeta is the first of what are held to be the three central books;central not only according to their situation within the text of theMetaphysics, but also, and much more significantly, in that they consti-tute one of the keystones of Aristotle’s ontology. In reading book Zeta inrelation to another of these keystones, namely the text of the Categories,the aim is to examine Aristotle’s approach to the question of being withregard to Heidegger’s attempts to destroy the traditional content ofancient ontology.

The first section of the chapter is concerned with Aristotle’s establish-ing of the form of thought that we have come to term ‘ontology’ andwith his reduction of the question of ontology to that of the nature ofousia, beingness. Particular attention will be paid to the morphologyand to the everyday, pre-philosophical senses of this Greek term, since itis to these that Heidegger appeals within his concern to overturn tradi-tional readings of Aristotle. In tracing the argument of Zeta, and withreference to the Categories, the second section of the chapter brings intorelief the impasse Aristotle reaches with the attempt to determine being-ness as to hupokeimenon or ‘the subject’ in the third chapter of the book.The section shows how the impasse is a function of the two differentapproaches that Aristotle adopts to the idea of subjectivity and beingnessitself: the categorial determination of being, on the one hand, and thetechnical or physical determination of being, on the other. Examining theproblem of subjectivity in this way enables us at the end of the section toassess fully Heidegger’s attempts to interpret the sense of both tohupokeimenon and ousia in a manner that allows Aristotle to be understood

19


as something other than a thinker of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘substance’. Thethird and final section of the chapter develops these arguments in show-ing how Aristotle’s two different approaches to the question of subjec-tivity and beingness are in fact a function of the problematic, explicitlydiscussed elsewhere in the Metaphysics, of ‘the manifold ways’ in which‘being is said’. This is a problem that famously motivated Heidegger’sphilosophical thinking at the beginning of his career, and it is on thebasis of delineating his approach to it that it will be possible, in the fol-lowing chapters of the study, to examine how fundamental ontologytakes up the development of Aristotle’s questioning of being in the sec-ond and third of the central books of the Metaphysics, namely books Etaand Theta.

1.1 Ontology and ousia

α – Ontology

In the first chapter of Metaphysics Zeta, Aristotle poses the guiding questionthat animates the collection of texts in its entirety: τg τ� �ν [1028b4]?The Greek �ν is a participle form of the verb ‘be’, '�ναι, and literallytranslated the question reads What is the being. Yet here to on has, in onesense, the significance of a collective noun in denominating everythingthat is, that which exists, the existent. In this manner, it is equivalent tothe plural participle form τb �ντα, ‘beings’. To on names beings, just as,for example, τ� καλ�ν, the beautiful, denominates all beautiful things.On these grounds, one might hope to provide an adequate response tothe question ti to on by pointing to particular beings, just as theinterlocutor of Socrates in the Greater Hippias [287c–d] responds to thequestion ti to kalon – What is the beautiful? – by referring to particularbeautiful things.

These participle forms have, however, a further and more profoundsense that is presupposed by their use as a collective noun. What distin-guishes something beautiful, what allows particular beautiful things tobe the beautiful things that they are, is the beautiful, beauty. We canmeaningfully describe something as beautiful, only if we somehow haveaccess to, only if we somehow understand what beauty itself is. Nowbeauty itself must in some way be other than particular beautiful thingsgiven that it is common to them all. Of course, how we are to conceivethe beautiful in its identity with and difference from beautiful thingsremains to be philosophically determined, but underlying the use of tokalon as a collective noun is its sense as naming what allows beautifulthings to be the sort of things that they are. The same applies to to on.



It can mean a being or beings but also that which distinguishes a being assuch, that by virtue of which a being is. What distinguishes a being fromnon-beings is the fact that it is, and a being is by virtue of its being; andbeing is somehow other than beings or things themselves because, asAristotle writes, it is ‘what is common (τ� κοιν�ν) to all things’[1005a27].

The question ti to on, then, enquires concerning beings as beings orbeings insofar as they are beings: τ� �ν �ν, as Aristotle otherwisearticulates the problem.1 By way of beings, the question seeks to deter-mine the being of beings, and the fact that being itself, and not merelybeings, is in question here is manifest in the infinitive form to einai,being, that Aristotle occasionally uses in the place of to on.2 Hence, ti toon is commonly translated as ‘What is being?’ Such is the most funda-mental question of philosophy, which, as Aristotle claims, was firstraised long before him. From Heidegger’s perspective, however, thisquestion of being is both ambiguous and limited. His argument is thatfor all that the question aims at the being of beings, it does not interro-gate being itself in a sufficient or sufficiently lucid manner preciselyinsofar as the meaning of being does not enter into the purview of itsenquiry. Certainly, what Heidegger terms in 1926 Aristotle’s ‘funda-mental science’ has ‘more to say than: being is being’ [G22 150].Aristotle, to be sure, seeks to arrive at a determination of the being ofbeings, and his response to the question of being is not an emptytautology. Yet, it would remain the case that the being of beings is heresought without the meaning of being having been posed explicitly as aquestion or seen as an issue. Aristotle would thus presuppose, unknow-ingly perhaps, a certain meaning of being within his attempt to deter-mine the nature of being itself, and this would limit the originality ofhis enquiry. This issue can only he dealt with schematically at this junc-ture, but Heidegger’s argument is that Aristotle’s thinking occurs withina paradigm or framework, the limits of which he himself has not under-stood. In fact, as Heidegger argues much more clearly after Being andTime than in the opening passages of this text itself, the meaning ofbeing is not brought into question by what he terms the ‘guiding-question’ of ontology or metaphysics that is here emphatically articu-lated by Aristotle.3 The fact that being has a meaning would rather bepresupposed or only indirectly seen in this enquiry, and it is for this rea-son that in the 1930s Heidegger claims that ontology as such has beenand is that form of thought that only passes over the question of themeaning or the essence of being itself. In posing the question of the mean-ing of being, therefore, Heidegger will seek to turn the guiding-question

The Question of Being 21


of philosophy, namely ‘What is being?’, into what he terms the‘grounding-question’ of philosophy, that is, the question of the mean-ing or of the essence of being.

In any event, according to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, it would seem thatthere exists a science or Rπιστxμη of beings in their being.4 We havecome to call this science ‘ontology’ or ‘metaphysics’, but these are notexpressions proper to Aristotle. The term metaphysics arises only in thefirst century after Christ as a means of classifying Aristotle’s writingsthat deal with beings in their being, and some sixteen centuries later thename ‘ontology’ will enter history for the first time.5 However, whilstneither ‘ontology’ nor ‘metaphysics’ constitute extrinsic and anachro-nistic titles for this particular science, one title that Aristotle gives it isfirst philosophy.6 Such a title seems to indicate that this mode of philo-sophical thought, of science, is of particular importance, and that itsomehow constitutes the base or the summit, and perhaps both, ofreflection. Notwithstanding its primacy, however, this science has aproblematic status, since it does not conform to Aristotle’s own accountof the nature or scientificity of science itself. For Aristotle, a particularscience bears only on one genus, one genus of beings; mathematicsbears on mathematical entities, for example, as physics bears on movingentities. Yet, being itself is not a genus, since, first of all, a genus consti-tutes a specific sort or region of beings – such as the mathematical andthe physical – which, by necessity, excludes others. Being cannot be agenus, and that is to say, it cannot constitute one region of beings, sinceeverything that exists is, precisely, ‘in’ being. Already on this basis, it ispossible to understand how Aristotle could have written elsewhere that,in fact, there can be no science of being.7

Despite its characterisation of first philosophy as a science, theMetaphysics provides other arguments seeking to demonstrate not onlythat being is not a genus, but also that there is no higher genus thanbeing itself. The latter argument has a similar form to the one sketchedin the preceding paragraph. There can be no genus higher than being,and that is to say, being cannot be subsumed under another genus,because everything that exists is in being. The supposedly higher genusbeyond being would have to be characterised by and thus participate inthat of which it is the genus, which is both absurd and impossible. Nowthe importance of this argument cannot be overstated, for it means thatbeing cannot be defined. For all that first philosophy, as we have seen,claims to search for the ti or the ‘what’ of the being of beings, being itselfescapes and transcends all definition. To define, for Aristotle, is to subsumewhat is defined under a genus of which it is the species; man, for example,



is a rational animal. To define being, then, would be to subsume it undera genus that would necessarily be more universal than being itself. Yet,this is impossible.

The former argument, the one according to which ‘it is impossiblefor … τ� �ν, being to be a genus’ [998b22], is justified in Metaphysics Betaby a demonstration of the absurd consequences of supposing that itwere: if being were a genus, it would have to be differentiated intospecies by differentia, such as rational in the case of the rational animal;yet everything is in being, and thus the genus would already be attrib-uted to the species-forming differentia, which is impossible. Species-forming differentia must be entirely independent of and unrelated tothe genus, and if animal could be attributed to rational, if the rationalwere already a species of the animal, then a cow would either not be ananimal or else be a human being, a rational animal. Being, therefore,may be common to all things, as we have seen, but this commonality isnot that of the generality of a genus – and not only can being not bedefined, but being itself cannot serve to define anything else.

β – The form and pre-philosophical senses of the Greek ousia

These preliminary considerations allow us to understand how, afterannouncing the apparently venerable question of being in MetaphysicsZeta, Aristotle can hold it to be difficult and problematic; the question‘which was raised long ago … is still and always will be what baffles us’[1028b3–4]. This question of being, however, is immediately rephrasedor drawn back to another question: What is οSσgα? The question ofbeing for Aristotle is a question of ousia, which was already the Platonicname for being. Morphologically, οSσgα derives from οBσα, the femi-nine nominative present participle of the verb ‘be’. To follow JosephOwens, this variation in the ending ‘renders the meaning more abstrac-tive than when the participle is used as a noun’.8 In English one canrender this more ‘abstractive’ sense by adding the ending ‘ness’ to‘being’ as a translation of the participle form. Ousia, then, is ‘being-ness’, and Heidegger translates the term in German in this way asSeiendheit. In the Physics Aristotle discusses phusis as J οSσgα τaν φjσ'ι�ντων [II, 1, 193a10], and such a phrase speaks of the beingness ofbeings, in this case the beingness of natural beings, and thus the termwould seem to have an ontological rather than simply an ontic mean-ing. It concerns, in other words, not merely beings, but beings intheir being.



Of course, as deriving from a participle form, the verbal form thatalso functions as a noun, ousia also denominates something, a ‘con-crete’ thing. Upon posing the question of ousia, Aristotle begins the sec-ond chapter of Metaphysics Zeta thus:

ousia is thought to be present (cπbρχ'ιν) most apparently in bodies.Hence we call animals and plants and their parts οSσgα�, and alsonatural bodies, such as fire, water, earth etc [1028b8–10].

Aristotle passes from the ‘abstractive’ to the concrete meaning in theone sentence. Beingness is thought to manifest itself in bodies, and forthis reason these bodies and their parts are οSσgαι, ‘beingnesses’.Evidently, the word ‘beingness’ renders this ontic or concrete meaningonly in a clumsy manner, but this difficulty by no means implies thatit will not serve as a translation of ousia, as Owens argues. The transla-tion that the author proposes, namely ‘entity’, is hardly a solution tothe problem, for it is problematic from the opposite perspective.Regardless of its etymological origins, ‘entity’ would seem to have anirreducibly ontic meaning, rendering a phrase such as ‘the entity ofbeings’ quite meaningless. Yet Owens is not mistaken to reject thetraditional English translation of ousia as ‘substance’, which derivesfrom the Latin substantia.9 In the course of the present chapter it willbecome clear how what Heidegger terms the ‘thoughtlessness’ [EM 46]of this translation tends to efface the original sense of the Greek word,but it is necessary, from the outset, to reject it on two counts.Primarily, substantia was not originally formulated as a translation ofousia, but rather as a transcription of the Greek cπ�στασι�, and there-fore it has no direct relation to the verb ‘be’.10 Second, the ety-mological sense of substantia as designating ‘what stands beneath’corresponds to merely one of the aspects of ousia as determined byAristotle, namely τ� cποκ'gμ'νον, which is commonly translated as‘the subject’ or ‘substrate’. Of course, ousia was first translated in Latinas essentia, essence, but this translation would now seem to privilegeanother specific moment of ousia, namely what a thing is in the origi-nally Platonic sense of its idea or form.

Although the translation ‘beingness’ might seem somewhat artificial,prior to its philosophical usage in Plato and Aristotle ousia was a com-mon Greek word, and it is to the original and manifold meanings of theword that Heidegger seeks to draw our attention. The first dictionarydefinition of it is ‘property’, ‘estate’, ‘possessions’ and ‘wealth’. How is itthat a word that derives from a participle form of the verb ‘be’ has this



meaning? Heidegger answers in 1927 as follows:

What is tangibly present and at-hand (vor-handen) is reckoned byeveryday experience as that which is, as a being, in the primary sense.Disposable possessions and goods, property, are beings; they are quitesimply that which is, the Greek οSσgα [G24 153/109].

Being for the Greeks, in the highest and proper sense, means to be in themanner of property, estate and possessions. Property and possessions arethat which is in the proper sense of the word. Such, for Heidegger, wouldbe one aspect of the meaning of being that is at least implicit in Greekontology.

In his magisterial study of The Verb ‘Be’ in Ancient Greek Charles H.Kahn has shown, quite independently of Heidegger and contrary towhat has often been assumed, that the appearance in Greek of ousia is,in fact, subsequent to that of the compound forms παροSσgα, presence,and iποSσgα, absence; the latter terms are ‘both found in Aeschyluswhereas the simplex οSσgα is not attested before Herodotus’.11 Ousia,then, would be a mere abbreviation of a word that means presence. Ofcourse, such an argument could be formally refuted by claiming, follow-ing Owens, that ousia means neither presence nor absence, but the Latinparticiple form ‘sence’ which is common to both, however we were toconceive the latter.12 Yet such a formal argument fails to take intoaccount the sense of ousia as property and estate in its manifest presence,and it is rather, for Heidegger, the case that the particle para is alwaysimplied in the simplex ousia. Being means presence for the Greeks inthe way that ‘real estate’ is present. The latter is not ephemeral butrather constant and built to last. Thus, as Heidegger has it, ousia means‘constance (Beständigkeit) in presence’ [G3 224/168].

This sense of the term ousia, then, is documentary evidence for theclaim that prior to its philosophical elucidation, being, for the Greeks,already has a determinate meaning or meanings, and is far from havingthe ‘vague and indifferent meaning of reality in general’ [PIA 52/392]. Itmust be said, as Heidegger does, that before the advent of philosophythe Greek language was already ‘philosophical’ insofar as a participleform of the verb ‘be’ articulates these meanings. The German languageis similarly fortunate since the family of words relating to the GermanAnwesenheit mirrors the polysemy of ousia. Formed from a past participleof the verb sein, ‘be’, das Anwesen means property, estate; das Anwesende,the one or that which is present; and Anwesenheit itself means presenceas opposed to absence.



Yet presence is a ‘moment’ or ‘part’ of time. Time in some sense ‘consists’of the past, present and future. It can be argued that this temporal mean-ing of ousia is the most fundamental meaning of the term, since it iswhat allows a word that pre-philosophically means property and estateto come to signify what is proper to beings as such, beings in their being,in philosophical discourse. The temporal sense of ousia, in other words,would underlie both the pre-philosophical and philosophical use of theterm. It is in this way that Heidegger aims to use ousia as documentalevidence for the argument that being in Greek ontology means presencein a definitely temporal sense:

The outward evidence [äußere Dokument] for this (although of courseit is merely outward evidence) is the treatment of the meaning ofbeing as παροSσ�α or οSσ�α, which signifies, in ontologico-temporalterms, presence [Anwesenheit]. Entities are grasped in their being as‘presence’; this means that they are understood with regard to a definitemode of time – the present [SZ 25].

The sense of ousia as parousia is itself only superficial evidence, butHeidegger will seek to show that Aristotle, and Plato before him, ‘under-stand’ being as presence, without explicitly reflecting on this under-standing itself. Being here would have a meaning, without this meaninghaving been brought explicitly into the open or having been thought assuch. In fact, it is this meaning of being that would determine the scopeand limits of the first extensive philosophical account of time, which isto be found in the fourth book of Aristotle’s Physics. The third chapter ofthis study will examine this question, but on Heidegger’s account, byvirtue of his ‘understanding’ of being as presence Aristotle would thinktime on the basis of the present, of the now, and perhaps even as itselfsomething present, ‘as one entity among other entities’ [SZ 26].

1.2 ‘Substance’ and ‘subject’

α – The categorial determination of beingness

The first chapter of Metaphysics Zeta, then, leads the question of beingback to the question of ousia itself. The second chapter begins by statingthat ousia is most obviously apparent in physical bodies and their parts.Yet, it is still necessary to determine ‘what things are beingnesses’,‘whether there are any beingnesses beyond the sensible’ and ‘how sensi-ble beingnesses exist’ [1028b29–30]. The question concerning the exis-tence of super-sensible beings is an indication that the question of



beings in their being unfolds in two definite directions for Aristotle: itleads not only to an ontology but also to a theology, to a determination ofthe being or region of being that is most in being, that being or regionof being whose presence and constancy is not subject to the vicissitudesof movement and time. Our immediate concern here is not with the linkbetween ontology and theology in Aristotle’s work, but in the terms ofthe later Heidegger, Aristotle’s metaphysics has an onto-theological con-stitution.13 In book Zeta, the immediate and more fundamental task,since it is presupposed by the other question, is one of achieving, if nota definition, for reasons that we have delineated above, then at least whatAristotle announces as a determination in its type, a typical determinationof ousia itself. Traditionally, the verb cποτωσαμNνοι� at 1028b32 is trans-lated as ‘to give a rough sketch’, but as Rudolf Boehm argues, here ‘thereis no trace of an opposition between an indeterminate “typification”and a distinct and determined concept’.14 In the absence of the possibil-ity of definition, then, first philosophy is by no means limited to thevagaries of an indefinite sketch of being; it is rather a question of strik-ing the stamp or mark that will determine beingness as such.

The third chapter begins in proposing four candidates for the title ofbeingness, namely τ� τg Dν '�ναι, the Latin quid quod erat esse or quidditas –which I translate as ‘quiddity’ – τ� καθ�λον and τ� γNνο�, the universaland the genus, and finally to hupokeimenon or ‘the subject’. The latter is,according to Aristotle:

that of which everything else is predicated, while it is itself not pred-icated of anything else. And so we must first determine the nature ofthis; for the subject is thought to be in the truest sense beingness[1029a2–4].

In asserting in this way the primacy of the subject as that of which every-thing else is predicated whilst not itself being predicated of anything else,Aristotle would seem to refer to the account of primary beingness that is tobe found in the text of the Categories. This reference to the Categoriesappears all the more evident on the basis of the first lines of book Zeta,which discuss the problem – one to which we shall return – of the manifoldsenses of being in a restricted, intra-categorial sense, as relating only to ousiaand the different categories, such as quality and quantity. Book Zeta thusseems to presuppose an understanding of the Categories, in which we read:

Beingness, in the truest, strictest, and the primary sense of that term,is that which is neither asserted of nor to be found in a subject, such



as a particular man or a particular horse. But we do speak of secondarybeingnesses, those within which, being species, the primary or thefirst are included, and those within which, being genera, the speciesthemselves are contained. For instance, a particular man we includein the species called ‘man’ and the species itself is included in thegenus called ‘animal’ [2a10].

In this pivotal passage, Aristotle distinguishes between something‘being in’ and ‘being said of’ the hupokeimenon. ‘Being in’ is the rela-tion of an attribute or quality to its possessor. The beings that are ‘in’ asubject are those incapable of existing apart from or ‘separated fromthe subject, in which they are’ [1a24–25]. Colour and size, for example,are not self-sufficient beings or independently existing entities; theyexist, and can only exist, on the basis of the thing, that is, the subjectof which they are the qualities. For its part, the subject would continueto exist in its own right if it were to undergo a change in its colour orsize; the green chair after having been painted red is still the particularbeing, the particular chair that it was. Such characteristics of a thing ascolour and size, therefore, do not constitute the being of things in aproper or the highest sense, but rather presuppose it. They are the mereσυμ�'�ηκ�τα or accidents of a being, what merely accompanies abeing.15

The difference between ‘being in’ and ‘being said of’ is not to bethought as a distinction between the linguistic and the extra-linguistic.A quality in a being is already an attribute or κατηγ�ρημα of that being,what can be said to exist in a being. The various modes in which some-thing is in a subject are, for Aristotle, categories and, as Heideggerreminds us, the verb κατηγορ'j'ιν, which is a contraction of κατ�-�γορ'j'ιν, means to accuse someone verbally in the �γορb, the publiccourt. The meaning and possibility of Aristotle’s categories as determi-nations of both language and things has been a matter of widely diverg-ing interpretations, but the difference between ‘being in’ and being ‘saidof’ lies in the ‘in’ and the ‘of’ rather than in the saying.16 When we saythat Socrates is a ‘man’, as opposed to saying he is white, this being-human is not a characteristic present in a subject. ‘Being said of’ a sub-ject is, in fact, a relation of the '�δο� and γNνο�, the species and genus ofa being to a singular, particular being itself. Now, the word eidos derivesfrom the verb ‘to see’, �ρbω, and before having any indifferently logicalsense, it denominates the aspect of a thing, that which is most manifestin or of a thing, and that which determines what sort of thing it is. The



what-it-is of a being as determined by the eidos and genos is, however,always predicated of what is termed a ‘this’ or τ�δ' τ [3b10], a singular,particular being as a subject. This singular being is the condition of, andis more primordial than, its being what-it-is. Certainly, it is not possibleto separate the one from the other; the subject of which the eidos isasserted is already and inalienably a ‘particular man’ or a ‘particularhorse’. Nevertheless, according to the text of the Categories the eidos thatwe predicate of the particular being is a secondary beingness, beingnessin a secondary sense, whereas the particular of which it is predicated isthe subject and primary beingness. This is to say that being a particularthing, a ‘subject’, is a more fundamental determination of the beingnessof a thing, than its being the sort of thing that it is.

With such an affirmation of the ontological primacy of tohupokeimenon as primary beingness, Aristotle distances himself fromthe thinking of Plato, according to which the eidos of a being is morein being than the particular being itself. In radicalising Socrates’questioning – What is virtue? What is beauty? – Plato is led to marvelbefore the eidos of beings, the look, visage or aspect according to whichthings present themselves as what they are. Yet since the eidos ofhouse, for example, is common to all particular houses, Plato separatesit from empirical beings themselves. A word that originally designatesthe visual aspect of a being now denominates what will, in fact, neverbe apprehended by physical eyes. The eidos as separate from empiricalbeings is now that which is most in being whereas the empirical beingitself merely partakes in this eidos, it is a mere image of the latter andis not properly in being. Against this promotion of the eidos over andabove the empirical being, then, the Categories asserts the ontologicalprimacy of the singular, particular being as the ‘subject’ to which itseidos is bound.

Concerning the idea of secondary beingness, however, a divergenceshould be noted here between the Categories and the Metaphysics.According to the former text, both the eidos and genus determine the τgRστιν, the what-it-is of a being, although the eidos is higher in relationto beingness than the genus since it approximates more to the particu-lar thing [2b8]. Metaphysics Zeta will, however, disqualify both the genusand the universal from the philosophical enquiry after having initiallyproposed both as two of the four possible determinations of beingness,since they would only be found in language, in the logos, and not in thethings themselves.17 As will become clear, it falls to quiddity to be thegenuine mark of the what-it-is of a being.



β – The physical determination of beingness: hylo-morphism and the horizon of production within greek ontology

The third chapter of Metaphysics Zeta seems to begin, then, in referringto the categorial determination of the subject as primary beingness. Yet, forall that the text of the Categories asserts the primacy of the hupokeimenon,it says what the latter is not rather than what it is, and as EtienneGilson notes, this is merely ‘to situate ousia rather than to define it’.18

Even if the aspiration for a definition of ousia is somewhat misplacedhere, it still remains to reach an understanding of the ‘subject’ itself,and this is the very task of the third chapter of Zeta. Aristotle proceedsas follows:

In one sense matter is said to be the nature of to hupokeimenon, inanother form, and in a third, the compound of these. By matter I mean,for instance, bronze; by form, the schema of the idea; and by thecombination of the two, the statue [1029a2–6].

Without warning the enquiry undergoes something of a paradigm shiftat this point. The apparently categorial determination of being is takenover by an extra-categorial determination of being, namely a thinkingof what is according to the concepts of !υλη and μορφx, matter andform. It is not by chance that, as David Bostock notes, ‘Aristotle’s logi-cal works show no awareness of the division of things into matter andform’,19 for both concepts arise within a quite different relationship tothings than that contained within the categorial determination ofbeings in speech. The paradigm is no longer what can simply be said ofa being, but is instead ποgησι�, the particular human comportmentthat is the production of things such as tables, chairs and artworks.Before examining the senses in which matter and form can be deter-mined as to hupokeimenon, therefore, it is necessary to examine thesense of Aristotle’s hylo-morphism and of the perspective of productionfrom which it arises.

First of all, hule does not originally mean matter as an undifferentiatedsubstrate of all things. It comes to have this sense in the Physics, as willbecome clear, wherein Aristotle argues for the existence of a primarymatter from which the four elements – earth, fire, air and water – derive.Prior to this account of matter, it means material in the sense of the rawmaterial, the work-material out of which a product is made. More nar-rowly it means wood, both in the sense of a wood or forest and of tim-ber as the work-material from which products such as tables and chairs



are produced. Thus, as Heidegger writes succinctly in 1927:

Matter plays a fundamental role in ancient philosophy not becausethe Greeks were materialists but because matter is a basic ontologicalconcept that arises necessarily when a being […] is interpreted in thehorizon of the understanding of being which lies as such in produc-tive comportment [G24 164/116].

The following chapters of this study will draw out fully the implicationsof this, but Heidegger’s argument is that the very idea of matter derivesfrom the interpretation of a particular comportment of the humanbeing, namely production.

Concerning the concept of morphe or form in Zeta, 7 Aristotle accountsfor his determination of it as the ‘schema of the idea’ in describing theprocedure of production and the mode of knowing that is proper to it,namely τNχνη: ‘Things are generated through techne from the eidos inthe soul. By eidos I mean the quiddity of each thing’ [1032b1]. Before thephysical process of production the producer must have in mind animage of the being that is to be produced, which image is the veryessence of the product that will, in the end, come to be present. In orderto produce a table, for example, the carpenter must first envisage theessential shape or form of the table to be produced. It can be said, there-fore, that:

health comes from health and a house from a house; that which hasmatter from that which has not. For the art of medicine or of build-ing is the form of health or the house. By beingness without matter Imean the quiddity [1032b12–15].

According to this use of the locution τ� τg Dν '�ναι, which I translateas ‘quiddity’, the sense of the imperfect tense Dν is apparent: thequiddity of a being is what it already was when it stands in its actualpresence.20

Concerning the concept of τ� σjνολον or the ‘compound’ of matterand form, it is necessary to note at this juncture that it cannot be under-stood as a compound of pre-existing parts. First of all, as Aristotleunderlines in Zeta, 17 form is not an ‘element (στοιχ'"ον)’ of a being[1041b14]. The elements of a being, as we read in Metaphysics Δ, are its‘first and immanent components’, such as earth and fire or the letters ofwhich a syllable is ‘composed (σjγκ'ιται)’ [1014a26]. The elements of abeing have the possibility of an independent existence, and are already



in themselves beings. Yet form cannot be understood as an element forit is what unifies diverse elements in the individuality of a particularbeing. Form is ‘something other’ [1041b27] than the elements that itunifies; it is of another order than these and thus it cannot be under-stood as a real part of a being. Form, in other words, is neither a beingnor an ontic property of beings, but rather a determination of the being-ness [1041b29], as Aristotle notes, of beings. Yet if form cannot beunderstood as an element or part of a being, can matter be understoodin this way? The fact that earth, fire, air and water are termed elementsmay seem to suggest a positive response to this question. However, ineach case these four elements are already matter in a particular anddeterminate form.21 It is, in fact, impossible to perceive either a formwithout a matter or matter without form; the one cannot be perceivedwithout or apart from the other. As little as form, then, is matter in itselfan element in the sense of a real, separable part of a being. It is in thissense that Aristotle, as we will see more fully, thinks matter and form astwo of the four ‘causes’ of beings as such, two of the four ontological,rather than simply ontic, grounds by virtue of which a being comes tobe and is the being that it is.

On the basis of delineating the technical or poietic origin of the con-cepts of matter, form and the compound of both, it is possible to com-prehend Heidegger’s assertion in 1931 that although form–matter isthe ‘most worn out schema’ in philosophy, one that is applied indis-criminately to each and every being, it did not ‘fall from the skies to beused at will’ [G33 139/110]. It rather arises from an interpretation ofthe being of the product. It should be noted here that for Kant the con-cepts of matter and form ‘underlie all other reflection, so inseparablyare they bound up with all employment of the understanding’.22 YetHeidegger’s historical birth certificate of metaphysics seeks to underlinethe fact that these concepts have their origin in a perspective or hori-zon of production, which horizon is the knowing, the practical know-how that is techne.

This technical horizon of Aristotle’s thinking may seem perplexing ifwe consider the primacy of sophia and the theoretical way of life forAristotle, such as it is articulated in the first book of the Metaphysics:

It is generally assumed that what is called Wisdom is concerned withthe primary causes and principles (τn πρaτα α$τια κα τn� �ρχn�),so that […] the man of experience is held to be wiser, than the merepossessors of any power of sensation, the artist than the man ofexperience, the master craftsman than the artisan [981b28–982a1].



Yet the point is precisely this: insofar as the person of wisdom is wiser –σοφ%τ'ρο� – than the ‘architect’ who draws up the plans, who is wiserthan the craftsman who, as is said, gets his hands dirty, who is wiser thanthe man of experience, who in turn is wiser than the men of mere sense-experience, there is, as Heidegger writes, a ‘genesis in factical life’23 ofsophia, which means that philosophy is born through and arises fromour everyday technical concern with production. Aristotle’s philosophi-cal thought never leaves this ground behind. It is from the inner con-nection of the eidos and matter–form within the domain of techne thatAristotle interprets the being of natural beings, the natural product, andbeings as such.

This horizon of production is already evident in the pre-philosophicalsense of ousia as property, possessions and estate. These beings arebeings that are produced, and both prior to and with the argument thatousia means constant presence, Heidegger also uses the term as docu-mental evidence for the claim that being means being-produced inAristotle.24 This horizon, however, by no means arises without prece-dent in the work of Aristotle and it is an essential moment in whatHeidegger terms the ‘ancient conception’ of being. Plato’s determina-tion of the idea as the genos of a being already speaks of the generation ofa thing, of that from which a thing descends, before having a merelylogical sense, and both these senses are still present in Aristotle’s defini-tion of the term [1024a29 ff.]. More specifically, throughout the 1920s,Heidegger outlines the argument that any understanding of how theeidos in Plato becomes genuine being or the genuine being over andabove the empirical being has first to recognise the sphere within whichsomething like an eidos ‘naturally and explicitly emerges’ [G19 47/33],namely the know-how specific to productive comportment. The argu-ment here is that Plato’s separation of the eidos from the empirical beingitself is motivated by the priority of the prototype or paradigm envis-aged by the producer before and for the process of production. Thissense of eidos is clearly delineated in the Cratylus [287c–d] and Book X ofthe Republic. In the latter text, Plato describes the envisaging of the eidosby the producer within a discussion of the nature of the artwork. Here,the empirical being – the product – is a copy of the idea or eidos in themind’s eye, and, consequently, the artwork, in being understood merelyto copy the empirical being, is but a copy of a copy and at a third stageremoved from the truth.

Heidegger’s argument does, however, encounter an essential diffi-culty: for Plato, it is not simply the case that one does not produce theeidos of the being to be produced. This Aristotle himself argues, since if



the eidos were produced it would have to be produced out of somethingand this would lead to an infinite regress.25 According to Aristotle, nei-ther the matter nor the form of a being is produced and one can produceonly the compound of the two. Yet Plato goes further: the eidos as theparadigm of the being to be produced is not in the mind of the producer.It is that upon which the vision of the mind’s eye must be focused, andwhich pre-exists this vision itself in an otherworldly sphere. This wouldseem to be why Heidegger only ever sketches the argument in the 1920sand why he speaks of the necessity of returning to Plato from Aristotleaccording to the Aristotelian hermeneutic principle that one must pro-ceed from what is clear to what is obscure.

Having discussed the technical origin of Aristotle’s hylo-morphism, it isnow possible to return to the question of how the hupokeimenon can bedetermined as matter, form and the compound of both. In order torespond to this question, however, it is necessary to determine howwithin the physical and, properly speaking, technical determination ofbeing the term hupokeimenon has two senses, which are both articulatedwithin the analysis of the principles of becoming or change in the firstbook of the Physics. For Aristotle, all change occurs between contraries.The becoming warm of something, for example, is the replacement ofcoldness by warmth. Yet if change is to be the change of somethingrather than a simple succession of unrelated and evanescent states, asthe Sophists would have it, then ‘something must underlie (δ'"cποκ'"σθαι τι) the contraries’ [191a4]. Moreover, there can be no ‘recip-rocal passion between the contraries’ themselves [190b33];26 warmthdoes not heat up cold but it rather heats that which is cold; love doesnot unite discord but unites what is in a state of discord, a being that hasthe property of being in discord. Were we not to posit such a third termunderlying the contraries we would be left with a difficulty, ‘for the con-traries never appear as constituting the beingness of beings’ [189a29].The contraries are mere attributes of beings, mere accidental predicates,and, for Aristotle, a predicate is always predicated of a ‘subject’. The rela-tion of the physical to the categorial determination of being that emergeshere becomes all the more evident when we consider that change is thatby which we are able to distinguish a subject from its predicates; wewould not be able to say that, for example, Socrates is sitting down ifthere were no movement by which we could distinguish this state of thebeing of Socrates from another.27 To hupokeimenon, therefore, is a princi-ple or �ρχx and is ‘prior to what is predicated of it’ [189a30].

Yet, what persists through the change whereby a being as such comesinto existence? Aristotle arrives at a conception of the ‘natural underlying



factor (cποκ'ιμNνη φjσι�)’ in what he terms pure genesis, which is to saynatural or technical production, by way of analogy:

It will bear the same relation to concrete things in general, or to anyspecific concrete thing, which the bronze bears to the statue before ithas been founded, or the wood to the couch, or that which is with-out shape to a beingness that has both individuality and being (πρ��οSσgαν Oχ'ι κα τ� τ�δ' τι και τ� �ν). This will count as one princi-ple but not, of course, one in the sense of a concrete individual (τ�τ�δ' τι) [191a10–12].

Wood comes to be a wooden couch when it has adopted the form of acouch. Bronze comes to be a bronze statue when it adopts the form of thestatue. Yet since bronze and wood are already particular forms of matterand come into and out of existence, there must be an utterly indetermi-nate and formless primary matter of which they are but are an epiphe-nomenal manifestation. There exists a primary matter that is not onlyprior to determinate work-materials, but also to the four elements. Ofcourse, this primary matter can only be known by analogy, since it is notpossible to encounter matter without form, but in its undifferentiateduniformity it is what would underlie all pure genesis.28

From the above it should be clear that determined hylo-morphically,the subject is either a singular being that exists as the compound of mat-ter and form, or a material substrate that underlies the change wherebysuch a compound comes into existence. As Aristotle writes inMetaphysics Z, 13: ‘about to hupokeimenon, of which we have said that itunderlies in two senses, either being a this, which is the way an animalunderlies its affectations – or as the matter underlies the act (Rντ'λ'χ'g&)’[1038b5–6].

γ – The problem of ‘subjectivity’ in Metaphysics Zeta, 3

We have seen that after articulating the categorial determination of thesubject as that of which everything else is predicated whilst not itselfbeing predicated of anything else Metaphysics Zeta, 3 proposes hylo-morphic determinations of the subject, as matter, form and the com-pound of both. As I have already indicated, the hylo-morphic andlogical perspectives are hardly incongruent and a thinking of the eidos ofa being is common to them both.29 Yet for all that the two perspectivesoverlap, the fact remains that if the categorial determination of being-ness contrasts to hupokeimenon to the eidos as primary to secondarybeingness, the technical determination of being can only speak of the



subject in terms of matter, form and the compound of both. From thislatter perspective form or eidos can no longer be thought as a meresecondary determination of beings. On the contrary, and as Aristotlecontinues:

if the form is prior to matter and more truly existent, by the sameargument it will also be prior to the compound [1029a6–7].

The ‘and’ in this sentence is not conjunctive but explanatory, whichmeans that the priority of which the sentence speaks is not chronologi-cal but ontological. Form is prior to matter, that is, higher than matterwith regard to being, because it is that which determines a being as thesort of thing that it is, as opposed to matter, which in itself is totally andutterly indeterminate; and insofar as form is prior to matter in this senseit will consequently be prior to the compound of the two. Far frombeing contrasted to the hupokeimenon, then, form is now in fact thehighest moment of it. At this point it becomes clear that if book Zeta ofthe Metaphysics presuppose the text of the Categories, it neverthelessseems to undermine the intentions of the latter text.

It is on this basis that Aristotle goes on, in fact, to bring into questionthe categorial determination of the subject in the following sentences ofthe text:

We have now stated in outline the nature of beingness – that it isnot what is predicated of a subject but that of which the otherthings are predicated. But we must not merely define it so, for it isnot enough. Not only is it obscure, but also it makes matter being;for if matter is not being, it is beyond our power to say what else is[1029a8–20].

We must not determine beingness as the categorially determined subjectbecause, primarily, it is obscure or unapparent, hδηλον. Aristotle doesnot provide a deliberate explanation of this obscurity, but it would seemthat it is obscure precisely because the categorial determination of thesubject says more what to hupokeimenon is not than what it is. Second,and more significantly, we must not define beingness in this way,because matter would thus become the basic or highest determinationof ousia, since we have no other way of accounting for the nature ofbeingness itself. If we contrast primary beingness to the eidos of a beingas secondary beingness, then we are left with no other means ofaccounting for the former than that of the concept of matter; and



accounting for the highest sense of being in this way would be nothingshort of nonsense, since matter in itself is utterly indeterminate.

On this basis, the chapter concludes in returning to the threefolddetermination of the subject according to matter, form and the com-pound of the two:

Hence it would seem that the form and the combination of form andmatter are more truly being than matter is. The being, then, whichconsists of both – I mean of matter and form – may be dismissed,since it is posterior and obvious. Matter too is in a sense evident. Wemust consider the third type, for this is the most perplexing[1029a29–34].

The compound of form and matter is more adequate to being thanmatter is, but form is prior to matter, and thus it is prior to the com-pound. A reflection on being as to hupokeimenon, then, is led, almostdespite itself, back to the question of form, to the point where Aristotlespeaks throughout Zeta of the eidos or what-being of a being as primarybeingness.30

It is true to say concerning the idea of primary beingness advanced inthe Categories, as does Etienne Gilson, that ‘every time that Aristotleattempts to say what it is he ends up contenting himself with sayingwhat it is not’.31 Yet the inability to say what it is in the Metaphysicsleads to an eclipse of the original idea itself. The consequent retreat inthe face of what Gilson calls the ‘question of questions’ to the profit ofa thinking of form constitutes, as commentators have never ceased toremark, the moment at which Aristotle’s opposition to Plato becomesunable to capitalise on its initial gains. If the supposition of the subjectas primary beingness is the starting point of the inquiry in MetaphysicsZeta, then it is precisely this starting point to which the procession ofthe philosophical inquiry never manages to return. It cannot be under-stood in terms of matter, since in itself hule is wholly indeterminate, butnor can it be understood in terms of form or eidos, which Aristotle willexamine in the guise of quiddity in the following chapters of Zeta. Thequiddity of a being is what each being is ‘said to be per se’, and it is ‘whatis most proper amongst the elements of the ti esti’, the what-being of abeing.32 It constitutes the most intimate essence of the eidos and ofwhat can be defined in a being, but, as such, it still excludes the acci-dents and matter of that of which it is the quiddity. As little as matter,therefore, can quiddity constitute the haecceity or the principle of theindividuation of particular beings.



δ – From substance and subject to beingness and the lying-before

With regard to the impasse that Aristotle faces in Metaphysics Zeta,Heidegger seeks to argue, as we have done in the preceding analyses,that if this text renders problematic what was asserted without any obvi-ous difficulty in the Categories, then this is because the perspective haschanged from the categorial to the poietic relation to beings.33 Aristotleattempts to account for the subjectivity discovered within the former bymeans of concepts germane to the latter, but this attempt is almostentirely self-defeating insofar as it undermines the categorial assertion ofthe subject as primary beingness. Yet, Heidegger offers a more funda-mental argument concerning the very sense, the ontological sense, ofthe idea at the origin of the difficulties Aristotle encounters, namely theidea of subjectivity itself.

The traditional translations of ousia and hupokeimenon as ‘substance’and ‘subject’ are both metaphors. Nevertheless, they both articulate adefinite interpretation of the Greek terms: Aristotle would posit the exis-tence of a ‘core’ of a being that would lie or stand ‘beneath’, so to speak,its accidental attributes. If, after book Zeta, to hupokeimenon can no longerbe opposed to ousia in a secondary sense, then Aristotle neverthelesswould offer us a thinking of the subject as a ‘substantial form’. This iswhat Zeta, I would describe in discussing the ‘separability’ of ousia.34 Ofcourse, we can never apprehend a sensible being without attributes, suchas a determinate colour or size, but it would remain the case that this coreis separable in the sense that it is the condition of, and prior to, its attrib-utes. Ross has even argued that the existence of the subject as substanceis ‘something self-evident’ for Aristotle, just as it for us, and that theStagirite adopts the ‘view of the “plain man” ’ in positing it.35

It is precisely such appeals to the self-evident and the obvious that arethe target of Heidegger’s attempts to destroy the traditional content ofancient ontology. As we read in the discussion of the idea of substancein ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, written in the 1930s: ‘what seems nat-ural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that hasforgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose’ [UK3 7/5]. It is nec-essary to recognise that what is self-evident for us was by no means nec-essarily self-evident for the Greeks themselves, and that with the idea ofthe hupokeimenon Aristotle articulates something new in philosophy,something unthought by his forebears. Moreover, it is necessary torecognise that the Latinate idea of substance itself is philosophicallyambiguous insofar as it serves to mark both sides of what Heideggerterms the ontological difference, the difference between being and



beings. As we read in §20 of Being and Time, within the philosophicaltradition, the ‘expression “substantia” functions sometimes with a signi-fication which is ontological, sometimes with one which is ontical, butmostly with one which is hazily ontic-ontological’ [SZ 94]. For all thatthe idea of substance posits the existence of an ontic core of a being – wemight say a ‘meta-ontic’ core of a being given that it can never be appre-hended in itself without accidents – the idea of substance is supposed toconstitute a response to ontological inquiry, to the question concerningthe being of beings. The fact that this traditional ambiguity containedwithin the idea of substance is not explicitly drawn out as the most pro-found of all questions only registers, for Heidegger, ‘a failure to masterthe basic problem of being’ [SZ 94].

Although some passages of Being and Time discuss the idea of tohupokeimenon relatively indifferently,36 Heidegger seeks to show else-where, throughout his career, that the question of the ontological differ-ence resonates perhaps even more strongly in the Greek term that istranslated as the ‘subject’ than it does in the term translated by the Latinsubstantia. Heidegger argues, in fact, that the translation of hupokeimenonby the idea of the subject obliterates not only this ontological problematicbut also the original sense of the prefix hupo-, which would not originallyhave a metaphorical sense. To treat the second point first, hupo would heremean not below but before, and this in the spatial rather than temporalsense of the term, as in the phrase ‘before the statue they prayed’. Thiscommon sense of the particle is manifest in the Greek huparchein, a verbthat appears in the first passage that I cited in this chapter fromMetaphysics Zeta, and which is ordinarily translated as ‘to be present’. Itis on the basis of understanding this point that it is possible to compre-hend the ontological sense that Heidegger attempts to draw from theparticipial form of the word hupokeimenon. The most telling expression ofthis argument is to be found in the following passage from Heidegger’sessay of 1939 on Aristotle’s conception of phusis:

One might object that our translation here is ‘wrong’. Aristotle’ssentence does not say … a ‘lying-present (Vorliegen)’ but rather ‘some-thing that lies present’. To understand why it is not wrong, however,requires of us (as is so often the case with the philosophical use ofthe Greek language, but too little noticed by later thinkers) that weunderstand the participle cποκ'gμ'νον in a way analogous to ourunderstanding of τ� �ν. T� �ν can mean a being, that is, this particu-lar being itself; but it can also mean that which is, that which hasbeing. Analogously cποκ'gμ'νον can mean ‘that which lies present’



but it can also mean ‘something distinguished by its lying-present’and so it can mean the very lying-present itself [G9 260/199–200].

To hupokeimenon is a word that would speak of a being, certainly, but of abeing in its being, of that which lies-before in its lying-before or lying-present. The participial form would offer itself to be understood, in otherwords, not only in its nominal sense, as naming a thing, but also accord-ing to its verbal sense, as speaking of an activity; in Thomistic terms, inspeaking of the ‘act’ of being itself. Understood in this way to hupokeimenonis a word that speaks of the ontological difference, of beings in their being,which being is conceived as a being-present. Hence, as Heidegger contin-ues: ‘in accordance with the explanation of οSσgα by way of cποκ'gμ'νονthe beingness of beings means for the Greeks the same as to lie present“there”, that is “in front of” ’ [G9 261/200].

The passages cited above from Physics I concerning the hupokeimenonmight seem to undermine both elements of Heidegger’s interpretationof the participial form, since, first of all, I resorted to the traditionaltranslation of the verb hupokeisthai with the English ‘underlie’. Yetdespite the commodity of this translation, its sense must be thought aspersisting in the sense of a remaining present, as Heidegger argues in1930.37 To hupokeimenon is what persists through change, it is that whichremains present. Moreover, in relation to the verbal sense of thehupokeimenon, it is necessary to recognise that Aristotle in no way sim-ply posits here a being, a thing, as what persists through its change. Thesubject is here one of three principles of the being in movement and, asPierre Aubenque writes, it is ‘less a being, than a power (puissance) ofbeing’.38 To hupokeimenon is less a being than a remaining-present, a fac-tor of the being in movement. This is one of the reasons why Aristotlecan think matter as the hupokeimenon in pure genesis, when matter itselfcan in no way constitute a singular, determinate being.

Both of the terms ousia and hupokeimenon, then, name an ontic-ontological difference, and they are to be understood in a verbal sense,as a being-present. Heidegger always, from the early 1920s onwards,advances this argument from the perspective of the physical determina-tion of beings, but even the categorial determination of to hupokeimenonas primary beingness is to be thought in this verbal sense. It is on thesegrounds that Heidegger can argue that to hupokeimenon is merely whatAristotle is ‘supposed’ [UK3 7/5] to have called a ‘core’ of beings, and thatthe ideas of the subject and of substance are essentially ‘un-Greek’.39

Certainly, primary being is what determines the singularity of a being,and it is prior to its accidental attributes. Yet Aristotle does not simply



posit an invisible but nevertheless ontic core of beings as a response tothe ontological question of the nature of being. In other words,Aristotle’s response to the question ‘What is being?’ is not simply: abeing. It is the being of the singular being, the singularity of the singularbeing that is in question with the terms ousia and hupokeimenon.Understood in this way, both terms would offer no grounds for theThomistic argument, articulated by Gilson and Owens after him, thatAristotle would remain at ‘the level of substance and essence’40 at theexpense of a veritable thinking of the existence or the ‘act of existence’of ‘substance’ itself. Even without taking into consideration the devel-opment of the question of being according to the ideas of δjναμι� andRν'ργ'gα, ‘possibility’ and ‘actuality’, in books Eta and Theta of theMetaphysics, for Heidegger, such an argument can claim to improve thework of Aristotle only on the basis of a traditional loss of the primordialtruth of his thinking.

1.3 On ‘being is said in many ways’

From Heidegger’s perspective, the promotion of what the Categoriesdetermine as secondary beingness to the status of primary beingness inMetaphysics Zeta is no mere idle contradiction, and nor is it one thatcould be adequately accounted for and explained away by means of areconstruction of the genesis of Aristotle’s thought, such as that pro-posed by Jaeger.41 For Heidegger, such genetic studies remain ‘withoutgenuine grounds’ in the absence of a ‘genuinely philosophical interpre-tation of Aristotelian research’ [G22 145]. The genuinely philosophicalinterpretation consists in recognising that Aristotle’s ontology is far frombeing systematic or univocal, and that there is a difference between thecategorial and the physical determination of being. These are two dis-tinct, though overlapping, perspectives and, famously, a constant refrainwithin the Aristotelian corpus is τ� �ν λNγ'ται πολλαχa�, ‘being is saidin many ways’. The final task of the present chapter is to delimit thespecific sense of this problematic of the manifold meanings of being.

The most complete enumeration of the manifold ways in which beingis said is to be found in Metaphysics Epsilon:

Being properly said is said in manifold senses: we have seen that therewas accidental being, next being as true and non-being as false;besides these there are the categories, for example, the ‘what’, quality,quantity, place, time, and any other similar meanings; and, further,besides all these, the possible and actual (Rν'ργ'gα) [1026a33].



Being, for Aristotle then, is said not just in two, but four, different ways.Now as scholars have often remarked, the discourse markers with whichAristotle links the moments of this fourfold – ‘next’, ‘beside these’ and‘further’ – show that the manifold senses of being are not worked out onany a priori or deductive basis. For Heidegger, Aristotle presents ‘a serialjuxtaposition without any consideration of their structure or connec-tion, much less of their justification’ [G33 13/10]. They are four ways inwhich, as it would seem, Aristotle simply happens to find being articu-lated. Of these four ways, however, it should be noted that the fact thatthe Greek word Oργον, which means a work or product, is contained inthe term Rν'ργ'gα serves to indicate that being as ‘possibility’ and ‘actu-ality’ belongs to the technical determination of being. Both concepts areissued as a means of accounting for the fact of movement, as the thirdchapter of this study will show, and they develop the account of beingsas a hylo-morphic compound. Metaphysics Epsilon adds, then, two waysin which being is said, namely accidental being and being as truth andfalsity, to the categorial and poietic determination of being that we havealready encountered.

The four ways in which being can be said are, however, immediatelyreduced to three since Aristotle disqualifies accidental being from thephilosophical enquiry to follow in the central books, Zeta, Eta andTheta.42 Yet, there is a basic question to be posed in relation to thevery idea of the multiplicity of meanings of being: how can being besaid in different ways without it falling into equivocation and mean-inglessness? According to the opening passages of the Categories, ifsomething is said in many ways, it is either said �μωνjμω�, equivocallyor συνωνjμω�, univocally. Things said equivocally are those that havethe same name but are different in definition, such as a ‘bat’, which isboth a furry flying mammal and something with which one hits a ball.Things said univocally are those that not only bear the same name butalso share the same definition such as a man and an ox, which are both‘animals’. Being said univocally is, therefore, the relation of genus tospecies.

Now as we have seen, being is not a genus, and no one way in whichbeing is said can be held to be the genus of the others, which wouldform its species. The ways in which being is said are not, for all that,condemned to the dispersion and arbitrary association of that whichmerely shares the same name, for Aristotle makes a further distinctionbetween what is said equivocally by chance and what is said equivocallywith reference to one guiding meaning. The different uses of the word‘health’ are offered as an example of the latter in a famous passage of



Metaphysics Gamma, 2. Health is a physical condition of the body. Yetwe also say that particular foodstuffs are healthy insofar as they can pro-duce health, that a walk is healthy because exercise can lead to goodhealth, and that someone has a healthy complexion because this com-plexion is a sign of good physical health. In each of these three cases,health is said neither equivocally as an accidental association of thesame name to different things nor univocally, for health in the primarysense of a bodily condition is not the genus of which the three otherexamples are species. In each case health is spoken of in a differentsense and yet πρ�� ;ν κα μιbν φjσιν [1003a33–4], with reference to ortowards something unified and of a single nature, in this case a corpo-real condition.43

The same can be understood to apply, then, to the manifold meaningsof being; they all refer back to a grounding meaning that is, in a sense,common to them all.44 Yet what is the meaning of being that is primary,to which the others all refer? The first lines of book Zeta would appearto offer incontrovertible evidence as to the primacy of the categorialdetermination of beingness. The book begins thus:

Being is said in many ways. […] It denotes first the ‘what’ of a thingand the tode ti; and then the quality or quantity or any other such cat-egory. Now of all these senses in which being is said, the primary isclearly the ‘what’, which denotes the beingness […] and all otherthings are said to ‘be’ because they are either quantities or qualities oraffections or suchlike [1028a10–20].

The fourfold of Epsilon, then, has become at the beginning of the cen-tral books a manifold that is merely internal to the categorial determi-nation of being. Being is already said in many ways within the latter,since the categories other than ousia always refer back to ousia itself;quality, for example, is always the quality of something, and it cannotexist independently of the beingness of which it is the quality.Consequently, it has been argued that the extra-categorial ways inwhich being is said and to be examined in the course of the enquirywithin the Metaphysics, namely being as possibility and actuality andbeing as truth, can be reduced to the former or, at most, that they aremere modifications of it. In fact, upon the interpretation of ousia in theCategories as substance, it has commonly been argued that the guidingand fundamental meaning of being to which all the others refer wouldbe substance. Aristotle would articulate a doctrine of substance or, atleast, such a doctrine is to be retrieved from the difficulties and contradictions



presented by the corpus that has been handed down to us. The attemptsto interpret Aristotle’s thinking in this sense are supported by the treat-ment of the ideas of possibility and actuality, on the one hand, andtruth, on the other, within the philosophical tradition itself. The con-ception of possibility and actuality in Kant, for example, as categories,categories of modality articulated within judgements,45 only facilitatesthe interpretation of dunamis and energeia as mere modifications of thecategorial determination of being. Moreover, once the question of beingas truth in Aristotle is viewed from the perspective of the modern under-standing of the judgment as the site of truth, truth becoming merely aproperty of judgments, the primacy of the categorial sense of beingseems assured. The other senses of being, if any sense can be made ofthem at all, would no longer have any of their own ground to stand on.Such an approach, it should be noted, determines Franz Brentano’sinterpretation in his On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle, a text thatserved as one of Heidegger’s introductions to philosophy in his youth.

Even though Heidegger attempts to draw out the ontological prob-lematic within the categorial determination of being itself, he seeks tooverturn any readings claiming the categorial to be the primary, if notthe sole, meaning of being in Aristotle’s ontology. To this end, in hismost extensive treatment of the question, which is to be found in a lec-ture course of 1931 on Metaphysics Theta, he advances a forceful argu-ment concerning the authenticity of the introductory lines of book Zeta,which state the problem of the manifold meanings of being only in thenarrow, intra-categorial sense.

For Heidegger, this statement ‘could not have come from Aristotle butwas inserted later by those who attempted to paste together the individ-ual treatises of Aristotle into a so-called work’ [G33 18/13]. Certainly, itcannot be denied that the categorial determination of being is presup-posed by the enquiry within Metaphysics Zeta, and yet it can be arguedthat the particular statement could not have come from Aristotlebecause the enquiry itself exceeds the categorial determination of beinginsofar as the hylo-morphic determination of being is extra-categorial.At the very least, it is necessary to recognise here that if Aristotle didwrite these lines, then he did not provide a particularly helpful intro-duction to the text, given that they seem to establish the enquiry withinlimits that the enquiry itself will go on to transcend.

After Zeta, however, Aristotle’s ontological enquiry further transcendsthe categorial determination of being. Books Eta and Theta will interpretthe hylo-morphic compound in terms of dunamis and energeia, and thisraises the ontological enquiry onto another, higher plane. On Heidegger’s



reading, the determination of beings in their being advanced by theideas of to hupokeimenon and ousia in Zeta would be thought more delib-erately and developed with a thinking of being as ‘actuality’ and ‘possi-bility’. Aristotle himself leads us to perceive this since elsewhere, in DeAnima or ‘On the Soul’, he underlines that: ‘admitting the one and beingare said in multiple ways, the principal sense (τ� κυρgω�) is that of ent-elechia’ [II, 412b8–9], the term entelechia here standing as a synonym forenergeia. The remark is distinctly troubling for those who claim the cat-egorial to be the primary sense of being, since here the claim is thatbeing thought as actuality is the principal, that is, the highest and mas-ter sense of being. On this account, the primacy that the categorialdetermination of being seems to bear at the beginning of the centralbooks of the Metaphysics is only, in the end, a chronological priority; thefact that Aristotle approaches the categorial sense of being first by nomeans implies that it is the most original sense or that the enquiry willbe confined to its limits. Hence, if we are to look for a pivotal or ground-ing sense of being to which the others would refer, then from this per-spective it would be more fitting to look towards the poietic rather thancategorial sense. In this way, the text of De Anima says what is not saidexplicitly concerning actuality and possibility in the Metaphysics, andyet book Theta of the latter text offers a competing account of the high-est or master sense of being, which is no less challenging to traditionalreadings. For in the final chapter of this book Aristotle writes that τ�κυρι%τατα �ν [1051b1], the master sense of being, is neither the cate-gorial nor the poietic, but is instead being as truth. Being as truth or�λxθ'ια would thus be the highest sense of being.

It is in examining, then, the senses of being as truth, and as actualityand possibility that Heidegger attempts to overturn traditional accountsof the primacy of the categorial determination of being. It is necessary tonote in this connection, however, that in 1931 he goes as far as to arguethat being, to on, thought as possibility and actuality would offer a‘non-ousiological’ and consequently ‘non-substantial’ determination ofbeing. On this account, ousia would be proper only to the categorialdetermination of being, and its translation by the Latin term substantia,which tends to efface the question of the ontological difference that itharbours, would not be as violent and thoughtless as Heidegger hasclaimed it to be elsewhere. Ousia, then, is to be distinguished from to on,‘ousiology’ from ‘ontology’, and ‘inasmuch as the question’ of the dif-ference between the two ‘has not been posed, much less answered, thisindicates that we have not come to terms with the question of being’[G33 10/7]. Yet this argument is deeply problematic, for any attempt to



isolate ousia as concerning solely the categorial determination of beingwould be bound to fail. We have already noted both that the categorialand poietic determination of being, though different, are not incongru-ent, and that the Physics discusses the ousia of natural beings [193a10].What we learn from this argument, an argument that Heidegger doesnot seem to repeat or develop elsewhere, however, is that it is alwaysfrom the perspective of the poietic determination of being, from beingthought as possibility and actuality, that he returns to the categorialdetermination of being in order to destroy the traditional interpretationof ousia and hupokeimenon in the Categories as substance and subject.46

In the introduction to this book it was stated that the second, thirdand fourth chapters of the work address the appropriation of Aristotle’sthinking operative within the analytic of Dasein according to the threeaspects of the ‘ancient conception’ of being delineated in §6 of Being andTime: being as being-produced, being as presence, and being as truth.We are now in a position to see that two of these three senses of theancient conception of being relate directly to the particular senses ofbeing that Aristotle himself delineates. The ancient understanding ofbeing as presence, however, would on Heidegger’s account implicitlyunderlie all of Aristotle’s thinking rather than being explicitly recog-nised within it. At any rate, although the second chapter of the bookindirectly discusses the account of being as actuality and possibility, inexamining Heidegger’s account of equipment as a repetition of Aristotle’spoietic determination of being, the sense of dunamis and energeia will bedeliberately discussed only in the third chapter, which shows how in thecourse of the 1920s Heidegger appropriates Aristotle’s conceptions ofmovement before attempting to delimit his account of time. It is on thisbasis that the fourth chapter will be able to take up the question of beingas aletheia, in showing how Heidegger seeks to destroy the traditionalcontent of Aristotle’s account of truth.



2Repeating MetaphysicsHeidegger’s Account of Equipment

The preceding chapter examined Aristotle’s articulation of the questionof being in relation to Heidegger’s attempts to bring to light the originalsignificance of ancient ontology. It is on this basis that it is possible toturn to the analytic of Dasein presented in the text of Being and Time andspecifically to the account of equipment that is an essential aspect ofthis analytic itself. The general concern of the chapter is to determinethe manner in which this account of equipment relates to, or inheres in,Heidegger’s destruction of the traditional content of ancient ontology asan attempt to think more originally the productive or technical horizonat the inception of philosophy.

In the last decades the account of equipment within Being and Timehas been the subject of much debate. Particularly in the light of the laterHeidegger’s delimitation of a world in which beings have become a‘standing reserve (Bestand)’1 ordered and controlled by the moderntechno-sciences, it appears both problematic and ambiguous. Does notthis ontological reduction of things to their utility, and of nature to amere natural resource, belong to the very history of metaphysics thatHeidegger will seek subsequently to delimit? In posing such a questionHubert Dreyfus has claimed that Being and Time represents a ‘penulti-mate stage’ in the history of metaphysics. Although this stage would beprior to the full-blown achievement of metaphysics in the technology ofthe twentieth century, it would nevertheless make possible the latter inremoving ‘every vestige of resistance … to the technological tendency totreat all beings … as resources’.2 This is an argument that Michel Haar hasreiterated in his The Song of the Earth.3 Michael E. Zimmermann, how-ever, has attempted to show that ‘Dreyfus may be overstating his case’.4

The author emphasises the aspects of Being and Time that defy a prag-matist or instrumentalist understanding of beings, and also the fact that

47


the analysis of equipment itself is already on the way to the later worksince it clearly distinguishes the mere manipulation of tools from modernindustrial technology.

To summarise the stakes of the debate, one party argues that the analy-sis of equipment represents a stage in the history of metaphysics and thusa definite, positive philosophical position, which position will be trans-formed quite radically from the 1930s onwards. The other stresses that itis already on the way to the later work, that the transformation is lessmarked than might be supposed, and that it requires, in effect, only aslight development or ‘correction’.5 Although Zimmermann’s responsehardly constitutes an argument against Dreyfus’ reading, both perspec-tives seem to have their own, at least partial, truth and validity: if thereduction of nature to a mere natural resource in Being and Time is unde-niable and somewhat disturbing then nevertheless the text does offer usanother attempt to think nature, and Heidegger’s later work is, in somesense, a consequence of this first analysis of equipment.

There is, however, an undisputed basis of this dispute. There is some-thing that Zimmermann does not bring into question in responding toDreyfus’ argument. This is the claim that the analysis of equipmentalityis a positive philosophical position. What is not brought into questionis the idea that just as Leibniz, for example, thinks beings monadologi-cally in 1714, or just as Kant thinks what is as a transcendentally deter-mined objectivity in 1781, Heidegger offers an analysis of equipment in1927. For in opposition to Dreyfus’ argument Zimmermann can onlyclaim that the positive philosophical position articulated in Being andTime is not quite or not yet the correct one.

It is precisely such positivistic approaches to Being and Time thatHeidegger decries in the passage, cited in the introduction to this study,from Meditation, a text written in the years 1938–40, which it is worth-while to cite again:

And even the attempt to lead this metaphysical thinking in itself backsimply to its own ‘presuppositions’ and thus to initiate from out of itselfits self-overcoming (Selbstüberwindung) must fail; for such an attempt(‘Being and Time’) is inevitably once more interpreted metaphysically[G66 211].

To fail to see that Being and Time leads, in a historical retrocession, meta-physics back to its own presuppositions would be to read the textmetaphysically, in what I have termed a positivistic fashion. Yet wereone to wonder how this passage could be in any way relevant to the



account of equipment, and, more significantly, to suspect here theviolence of a retrospective self-interpretation achieved only after theKehre of the mid-1930s, the following passage from a 1931 lecture courseconcerning Metaphysics Theta articulates specifically why the analysis ofequipment must be understood as more or perhaps less, at any rate assomething other than a positive philosophy:

What the Greeks conceived as Rπιστxμη ποιητικx is of fundamentalsignificance for their own understanding of the world. We have toclarify for ourselves what it signifies that man has a relation to theworks that he produces. It is for this reason that a certain book calledBeing and Time discusses dealings with equipment; and not in orderto correct Marx, nor to organise a new national economy, nor out ofa primitive understanding of the world [G33 137/117].

The analysis of equipment does not result from a narrow or primitive,that is, pragmatist view of the world but rather arises on the basis ofGreek thinking. The analysis would find its raison d’être in the thoughtof the Greeks, for whom episteme poietike – a knowledge of producing,a practical know-how, that is otherwise denominated as techne – wasfundamental for their determination of what is. It would be less of areturn to the things themselves, a simple description of experience, thana return to a technical or productive horizon at the inception of meta-physics. Ultimately, then, the very sense, meaning and possibility of thisanalysis would answer only to the following question or questions: Whymust phenomenology make such a return to the Greeks, what are thescope and limits of this step backwards and what does it achieve?

Of course, and as the introduction to this study indicated, the basicfact that the very origins of the analytic of Dasein lie in a phenomeno-logical interpretation of Aristotle is more or less well-known given thepublication of Heidegger’s texts of the early 1920s.6 Yet in responding tothe above questions, the task of the present chapter transcends anyattempt to establish merely Heidegger’s ‘debt’7 to Aristotle. I aim toshow that the historical significance of the analysis of equipment can becomprehended only in determining how it is offered as a ground-layingof the productive horizon of ancient ontology. It is in interrogating theimplications of this act of historical ground-laying that I aim to makemanifest the significance of the analysis of equipment as a leading-backof metaphysics to its own presuppositions.

The chapter is divided into three sections, sections which reflect thefact that the account of equipment is a multi-layered and polyvalent

Repeating Metaphysics 49


piece of philosophical work. Notwithstanding the basic aim of the chapter,the first section examines the account as an aspect of the analytic ofDasein in Being and Time independently of its relation to the work ofAristotle. The section focuses on the manner in which the account isachieved by radicalising the phenomenological conception of inten-tionality, and subsequently on the problems that it meets with regard tothe status of nature in particular. Proceeding in this fashion will allow usto evaluate Heidegger’s important claim, issued in 1929 partially inresponse to the problem of nature within Being and Time, that theaccount of equipment was more of a philosophical means than an endin itself insofar as it served to gain access to the ontological structure ofDasein’s being that is world or worldhood. In turning to Heidegger’sinterpretation of Aristotle, the second section shows that the most pro-found sense of the account lies in its attempt to expose the original truthof the technical horizon of Aristotle’s thinking. The third section, inconclusion, determines the historical significance and the limits of thisrepetition of the origin of metaphysics by showing how, in leadingmetaphysics back to its own presuppositions, it already points beyonditself towards another thinking and thus to Heidegger’s later work.

2.1 Hand and world

α – Transcending intentionality

In a footnote to the essay of 1929 ‘On the Essence of Ground,’ Heideggerseems to respond to pragmatist interpretations of the analysis of equip-ment in Being and Time that would pass over the ontological issue ofDasein’s being-in-the-world. If this analysis is understood in a superfi-cial, ontic sense, then ‘there is certainly no prospect’ of understandingthe ‘fundamental constitution of Dasein’ [G9 155/370]. Subsequently,however, Heidegger writes:

The ontological structure of beings in our ‘environing world’ does,however, have the advantage, in terms of an initial characterisation ofthe phenomenon of world, of leading over into an analysis of thisphenomenon and of preparing the transcendental phenomenon ofworld. And this is also the sole intent – an intent indicated clearlyenough in the structuring and layout of §§14–24 of Being and Time –of the analysis of the environing world, an analysis that as a whole,and considered with regard to the leading goal, remains of subordinatesignificance.



Heidegger’s claim here is that the analysis of the Umwelt or environingworld, and that is to say, the analysis of equipmentality, would serve tolead phenomenology to the structure of world (Welt) or worldhood(Weltlichkeit) as such. World in this sense, as we will see, is not a mereontic totality of things with which a Cartesian, worldless subject wouldreckon and to which it would be opposed, but instead an essential aspectof the being of Dasein as a being-in-the-world. The claim, however,implies that the full ontological structure of worldhood would not beexhausted by its determination as the environing world; the latter wouldbe merely one modality or aspect of the former, and the former wouldbe, to use spatial metaphors, more profound or wider than the latter.Insofar, then, as the analysis of the Umwelt or environing world ‘leadsover’ to an analysis of the more basic phenomenon of worldhood assuch, the account of equipment would be of ‘subordinate significance’,and would, in fact, be more of a philosophical means than an end initself within the general economy of the analytic of Dasein.

It should be noted that the specific claim in this passage that the soleintent of the account of equipment is to lead phenomenology to thestructure of worldhood is not true and quite misleading, for it has other‘purposes’ in relation to Greek ontology. Nevertheless, the argumentthat the account of equipment is more of a means than an end withinthe analytic of Dasein does have its own truth. Certainly, the ‘essentialgain (wesentlicher Gewinn)’ [SZ 352] that the account of equipment rep-resents constitutes an integral aspect of the analytic of Dasein from itsbeginning to its end, but it is nevertheless clear that this account isintroduced in §§13–24 of Being and Time in order to make manifest thetranscendental structure of world. What is less clearly signalled in the text,and what it is necessary to outline here, however, is the fact that itachieves this in transforming, in thinking through and beyond, the ideaof intentionality that Heidegger inherits from the phenomenology ofEdmund Husserl, his teacher, who had in turn taken up the idea fromthe work of Franz Brentano.

It is possible to isolate three stages in this movement from the phe-nomenological conception of intentionality to an account of world-hood. First of all, §13 of Being and Time takes up Brentano’s formulationof the idea of intentionality in describing the being that we are or atleast can be, namely Dasein, as a ‘directing itself towards (Sichrichten auf)’[SZ 61] the beings that it is not.8 For Heidegger, however, this inten-tional relation is prior to the relation of a knowing subject to a knownobject, since we are already concerned with things before any act ofjudgement or reflection. We are already involved with things before any



theoretical apprehension of them, and the idea of theory is here to beunderstood not only in the modern sense, which would include the cal-culative and ‘disinterested’ stance of the scientist, but also in theoriginally Greek sense of θNορ,ιν as a thematic intuition, an aestheticcontemplation of beings. Theory in the first sense presupposes thesecond, and this second sense is already a founded or secondary modalityof Dasein’s being-in-the-world:

This kind of being towards the world is one which lets us encounterentities within-the-world purely in the way they look ,�δο�, just that;on the basis of this kind of Being, and as a mode of it, looking explic-itly at what we encounter is possible [SZ 61].

Beings show themselves within our everyday activities (Umgang) and toan everyday concern (Besorgen) before they are simply stared at as thingsin their specificity and individuality.

The second moment in the movement from a conception of inten-tionality to one of worldhood arrives with the further interpretation ofthis pre-thematic intentionality according to the guiding thread of theparticular comportment that is manual production. The ‘entities first the-matised phenomenologically’ in the analysis are ‘those which are used,which are found in the course of production (das Gebrauchte, inHerstellung Befindliche)’ [SZ 67]. The exemplar or paradigmatic environ-ment for the analysis is the ‘workshop (Werkstatt)’ or the ‘work-world ofthe craftsman (die Werkwelt des Handwerkers)’ [SZ 85]. Phenomenologyhere looks first to manual production and more generally to manualactivity in order to arrive at an ontological determination of our activi-ties as such and of the being of the entity encountered within the worldas such. The question of the meaning and possibility of such anapproach ultimately finds an answer only in relation to the work ofAristotle, but it is in a certain sense facilitated by the fact that theGerman word for action, Handlung, already contains a reference to thehand. The German word could be compared to the word, of French ori-gin, manœuvre insofar as here the work of the hand is extended to a moregeneral sense of acting. In any event, acting or doing as the more generalterm that comprises making is here viewed from the specific perspectiveof making; in Latin agere is here determined with a view to facere, and inGreek praxis with a view to poiesis.

The entity encountered within our everyday dealings is termed dasZeug. As a collective noun the word designates man-made things thatserve a purpose, namely implements, utensils, gear or equipment.9 One



can translate das Zeug as ‘product’ or ‘equipment’; ‘equipment’ is helpfulin that it is a collective noun, yet ‘product’ is equally important in that,as I will show, the analysis of das Zeug aims to ground the horizon ofproduction at the origin of Greek ontology. Now, equipment is thatwhich has a function or purpose, that which has been produced for apurpose as with ‘equipment for writing, sewing, working, transporta-tion, measurement (Schreibzeug, Nähzeug, Werkzeug, Fahrzeug, Meßzeug)’[SZ 68]. The fact that equipment is always equipment for something,something which exists for us ‘in-order-to (um zu)’ do something, meansthat an individual item of equipment is what it is only in relation toother items of equipment, that it ‘always is in terms of its belonging toother equipment’. This is evident to both the German and English lan-guages since ‘strictly speaking’ there is no such thing as ein Zeug, anequipment. Each individual piece of equipment arises within what istermed a structure of reference (Verweisung): the pen is equipment forwriting only in being referred in its use to the paper; the hammer isequipment for hammering only with reference to the nails, the nailswith reference to the wood and so on.

This referentiality is not determined by a goal or end that would bedecided by a reflecting subject. Before being grasped conceptually, beforebeing thematically apprehended, the hammer is first of all manipulated,grasped with the body and by the hands. This grasping must withdrawitself from our attention by virtue of a certain ‘forgetting’ [SZ 354],which is prior to, and the condition of, any explicit act of reflection ormemory. Action has, in other words, its own intelligence, its own sight,its own foresight and hindsight; it is, properly speaking, neither non-theoretical nor pre-theoretical, but is rather guided by a seeing peculiarto it. Heidegger terms this seeing a circumspection, an Umsicht, takingadvantage of the fact, as with the terms Umgang and Umwelt, that ‘um’can mean both ‘around’, here in the sense of a looking about or around,and, with the preposition ‘zu’, ‘in-order-to’. What we originally see is seenin a context of or as a function of, our projects. The entity as equipmentis originally seen as something in-order-to do something, and as some-thing that points beyond itself according to the task at hand.

What should be underlined here is the fact that Heidegger redeter-mines the traditional conception of intentionality not only in showinghow our relation to beings is originally non-thematic, but also in deter-mining this pre-thematic or operative intentionality from the perspectiveof our use of equipment and thus from our interests or intentions inthe everyday sense of the term. It is in developing what is historicallythe derivative sense of the philosophical term intentionality – the



derivative sense that in fact led Brentano to wonder whether he shouldnot have avoided the term altogether10 – that Heidegger transformsboth Brentano’s and Husserl’s determination of it as a Vorstellen orVergegenwärtigen, as the mental act of presenting or making present anobject.

According to Being and Time, the entity apprehended by our circum-spection is zuhanden, ‘ready-to-hand’, before the possibility of its beingperceived or intuited as vorhanden. Before continuing with the questionof intentionality and worldhood, two points are to be noted here: first,if Being and Time attempts to establish a sharp distinction betweenZuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit, the reference to the hand in both termsbetrays a more profound affinity, an affinity that is only clarified, asI will show, within Heidegger’s destruction of the history of ontology. Itis, in other words, only within this destruction that Heidegger clarifiesthe reference to the hand contained in the term Vorhandenheit, a termwhich is introduced as an ‘interpretative expression’ [SZ 42] of the Latinexistentia, and which ordinarily designates the fact of something’s beingthere, its being at-hand and thus its being available in the widest sense.Second, if equipment is zuhanden or ready-to-hand, then this does notmean that the referentiality of equipment only functions according toan item of equipment that we have in hand. Nor does it mean that allequipment has this destination to our hands, that all equipment ismanipulable or handlich. Equipment, as Heidegger will specify in a lec-ture course of 1927, is ‘not only equipment for writing or sewing; itincludes everything we make use of domestically or in public life. In thisbroad ontological sense, bridges, streets, street lamps are also equip-ment’ [G24 414/292]. These streets or street lamps are not, of course, inany literal sense ready-to-hand, and they do not serve a purpose in beingmanipulated. The being as ready-to-hand is not what it is, or, better, it isnot how it is in being manipulated. It is rather the circumspection ofDasein that confers to the innerworldly being its Zuhandenheit in appre-hending pre-thematically a totality of equipment or a totality ofreferences. This circumspection, then, is the prior condition of any par-ticular item of equipment. As the last quotation indicates, however, itnevertheless remains the case that the determination of the being ofequipment as such is achieved from the perspective of the use and theutility of the Werkzeug – the tool that one manipulates – and the visionor the specific intentionality which guides this comportment. It is fromthe intentionality peculiar to the use of the tool – der Gebrauch desWerkzeug – that Heidegger interprets the being of the innerworldly beingin general as referentiality. One could question the legitimacy of such an



extension of the intentionality of our use of tools to the product as suchand in general. For commonly and properly speaking, we do not, forexample, use our shoes, but rather they are worn, need it be said, on ourfeet; and in being worn they are not used up but rather worn out.Moreover, it may seem at the very least doubtful that in walking in thestreet – the street which is, for Heidegger, equipment for walking – allthat surrounds me is encountered within a horizon of references.Certainly, one does not, for the most part, pay attention to the pave-ment on which one walks, and one usually walks in order to arrivesomewhere, but do the cars, the buildings and trees refer to each otherwithin a horizon of references?

Heidegger may give the impression of having recognised that equipmentis not always useful insofar as he enumerates modalities of the in-order-toof equipment: Dienlichkeit, Beiträglichkeit, Verwendbarkeit and Handlichkeit[SZ 68]. Not all equipment, then, is Handlich or handy, and Beiträglichkeit –a helpfulness or conduciveness – may seem to suggest something otherthan the ideas of the being-useful or the being-able-to-be-used of some-thing, which are articulated by the terms Dienlichkeit and Verwendbarkeitrespectively. Yet these modalities are never clearly distinguished fromeach other, and when the text turns to the example of a pair of shoes itdoes so in terms of Verwendbarkeit, which is to say that the example doesnot in any way interrupt or even complicate the analysis of referential-ity. In any event, recognising the fact that the analysis of Being and Timeprivileges the utility or usefulness of the tool that we have in hand isessential for an understanding of why, to note a question to which I willreturn, in the final version of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ Heideggerturns to the example of a pair of shoes in order to reveal a reliability(Verläßlichkeit) of equipment that is prior to and the condition of itsusefulness or utility (Dienlichkeit).

To return, however, to the question of Heidegger’s movement from athinking of intentionality to a thinking of world, the third moment ofthis movement occurs with the elaboration of the ‘structural items’essential to the referentiality of equipment. There are three such items:

1 Primarily, rather than the ‘tools themselves’ Dasein is concernedwith the ‘work – that which is to be produced’, the ‘towards-which (Wo-zu)’ [SZ 70]. The table, for example, that we are in the middle of makingis ‘that with which we are primarily occupied (das primär Besorgte)’.Given that it is part of a totality of references, this ‘towards-which’ isalso zuhanden. It is, however, that which ‘carries’ a totality of references,since there can be no such totality without something to produce.



Moreover, if the work will take its place within a totality of referencesonce produced, then even in the process of production the work to beproduced is referred beyond itself to what it is produced for. Thetowards-which ‘has in its turn the kind of being of equipment’ [SZ 70]since products are produced for a purpose.

2 Work-material constitutes the second item. The work to be producedis not merely produced for something but it is also produced from ‘mate-rials (Materialien)’;

In the environment certain entities become accessible which arealways and already ready-to-hand, but which in themselves, do notneed to be produced. Hammer, tongs, and needle, refer in themselvesto steel, iron, metal, mineral, wood, in that they consist of these. Inequipment that is used, ‘Nature’ is discovered along with it by thatuse – the ‘Nature’ we find in natural production [SZ 70].

Prior to the determination of nature as the objectively determined mat-ter (Materie) of the natural sciences, we encounter a nature that furnishesthe materials of production. The work to be made will be produced fromsuch materials, and the equipment that we use to produce it has itselfbeen produced from them. This original nature, then, is a type or par-ticular region of innerworldly beings that are not, or are not yet an itemof equipment. These beings do not need to be produced and are whatproduce themselves. The sense or indeed the possibility of such naturalproduction is not given any positive ontological clarification withinBeing and Time, but nature in this sense is encountered within the scopeand range of the work to be produced; ‘the wood is a forest of timber, themountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power’ [SZ 70]. Even out-side of the specific perspective of the workshop, nature is originallyencountered as a function of our projects, since the ‘wind is wind “inthe sails” ’, apprehended according to an everyday estimation or reck-oning (Rechnung)’ [SZ 102], before it is measured or calculated objec-tively and numerically in its velocity at the meteorological station.

This nature as what is always and already zuhanden was named beforeBeing and Time, in the lecture course of 1925 entitled Prolegomena to theHistory of the Concept of Time, what is always and already vorhanden.11 Thisearlier formulation shows us a use of the term Vorhandenheit that is inaccord with its literal sense; nature is here that which is available, thatwhich is found before the hand through our use of equipment. Between 1925and 1927, however, it would seem that Heidegger has made a decision,one that can be explained quite easily: in spite of all that distinguishes the



tool or equipment from nature as a natural resource – the latter is not, orat least, is not yet a tool – to the extent that it appears within a horizonof references, nature also is zuhanden. Certainly, the terms ‘alwaysalready’ preserve an intrinsic difference between the natural and theartificial product, but within the transcendental perspective of funda-mental ontology, one that attempts to determine things as such and ingeneral as determined by referentiality, this difference cannot be grantedany genuinely ontological status.

3 If the towards-which is what carries a totality of references, then thisWo-Zu itself is always determined by a ‘primary towards-which (primäreWozu)’. This primary towards-which is a ‘for-the-sake-of-which (Worum-willen)’ that ‘always pertains to the being of Dasein, for which in its Being,that very Being is essentially an issue’ [SZ 84]. Our practical projects alwayshave as their final end our own being itself, even if we do not ordinarily seeor grasp ourselves authentically as such a for-the-sake-of-which; the ham-mer is used to hammer the nails, to consolidate a house, and thus to pro-tect ourselves from bad weather. The being of the beings that we are notas encountered within a horizon of referentiality, then, has its ground inthe being of Dasein. Heidegger’s phenomenological reduction to equip-mentality ontologically reduces the innerworldly being, and this includesnatural beings, to a function of the intentions or, more plainly, the will or‘willing (Wollen)’ [SZ 194] of the being that we are.

Now it is by means of elaborating these moments of the structure ofreferentiality that §18 of Being and Time is able to determine the wholeof this structure as an a priori transcendental horizon, an a priori horizonwhich is worldhood. In any given situation, an individual item of equip-ment appears as referred to others within a totality of equipment. Thesereferences are not the ‘things’ themselves but rather constitute the hori-zon in which they can appear, a horizon of meaning or sense(Bedeutsamkeit) [SZ 85]12 by virtue of which items of equipment can beencountered as referring to one another. A totality of equipment is onlymade possible, then, by a totality of references, which Heidegger other-wise terms a Bewandtnisganzheit. This can be translated as either a total-ity of involvements, following Macquarrie and Robinson, or as a totalityof finality, but in choosing the latter option it is necessary to recognisethat the German term serves to bracket any traditional conception offinality. Finality, here, determines the being of the innerworldly being assuch and does not result from the thinking of a reflective subject.

Consider that in a particular situation Dasein lets a hammer be involvedin a project and thus with other items of equipment; this ontic letting be



involved of a particular item of equipment within a particular projecthas for its condition of possibility an ontological ‘letting-be-involved(Bewendenlassen)’ [SZ 85]. Regardless of whether the item of equipment isa hammer or a saw, Dasein lets the item of equipment be an item of equip-ment as such, and this by way of understanding pre-thematically ahorizon of references. In order for equipment to be equipment, this total-ity of references must have been, if not ‘discovered (entdeckt)’ – Heideggerreserves the term for the things that we are not – then ‘disclosed(erschlossen)’, and the ‘previous disclosure of that for which what weencounter within the world is subsequently freed amounts to nothing elsethan understanding the world’ [SZ 85–6]. The understanding of world,then, as an a priori horizon of finality, is the condition of possibility of theuse of equipment; and, for Heidegger, it is by means of the understandingof this horizon that there at once occurs a pre-reflective understanding ofthe being of the innerworldly being, namely its Zuhandenheit.

At this juncture, it is possible to comprehend how Heidegger’s re-determination of intentionality leads to a surpassing of the idea ofintentionality as such. In fact, it is on this basis that it is possible tounderstand the movement of Heidegger’s thinking from the delimitationof the task, issued in 1925 within a reading of Husserl, of a rethinking ofthe ‘being of the intentional’ [G20 148/108] to the following assertion of1928: ‘transcendence, or being-in-the-world is never to be equated andidentified with intentionality; if one does so, as so often happens, oneproves only that he is far from understanding this phenomenon and thatthe latter cannot be grasped immediately’ [G26 215/168]. World is not tobe equated with intentionality for it is not a particular or occasional acton the part of Dasein, but an a priori horizon of all such acts. Before anyintentional – in every sense of the term – relation to particular beings thehorizon of the world has and must have already been disclosed. Hence ifDasein’s circumspection is to be understood as a relation to beings, thisrelating is only possible on the basis of the prior understanding of theontological horizon of world, which itself is a constituent of the being, ofwhat Heidegger terms the Existenz, of Dasein; world is an existential asopposed to the categories that determine the being of the things of theworld, namely Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit. Dasein is that being towhich belongs being-in-the-world, and, to be sure, it is not in the worldlike shoes are in a box. It might be better to say that Dasein is its world,which is to say that Dasein is no mere thing or substance in one region ofthe world, about which we would have to wonder how it could get acrossto the beings that it is not in order to perceive them. As Heidegger is keento stress, Dasein is already this ‘across’. Therefore, Dasein is not merely, to



translate the German term literally, a being-there, for this can be said ofany particular thing that the human being is not, but a being-the-there,the very condition of possibility of distinguishing any particular ‘here’from any particular ‘there’.

What I hope to have shown in the preceding pages, then, is thatHeidegger’s claim in 1929 to the effect that the account of equipment ismore of a means than an end in Being and Time is far from being false.Although, and it is important to note this, Heidegger’s lecture coursesappear to show that he had already advanced an idea of worldhood inthe 1920s prior to articulating an explicit account of Zuhandenheit,13

the account allows phenomenology to move from traditional determi-nations of intentionality to a thinking of world. Certainly, the questionof what sense can be lent to the idea of worldhood beyond its determi-nation as the work-world or environing world remains, and this is aquestion to which the following section of the chapter responds. Yeteven in abstraction from the question of its relation to Greek ontology,the account of equipment does have a purpose beyond itself within theanalytic of Dasein, a purpose that allows us to understand how the textof Being and Time could itself describe this account as ‘restricted,’ ‘nar-rowed down’ and ‘simplifying’ [SZ 118], and why commentators haveoccasionally doubted its ‘phenomenological credentials’, holdingHeidegger to have ‘overstated the matter’ concerning Zuhandenheit,since ‘we do encounter the occurrent, the present-at-hand, in oureveryday awareness, and not just as a matter of remotion from thepractical’.14

β – The scission of nature in being and time

A poor life this if, full of care, we have no time to stand andstare.

William Henry Morris

The analysis of equipment already seems to meet its own limits in rela-tion to the idea of nature discussed in §15 of Being and Time, for, as hasoften been noted, there is a certain scission or slippage in the idea ofnature here, insofar as there are two more or less distinct approaches toit. Heidegger attempts to account for nature not only as a naturalresource, with which we would engage within the horizon of our practi-cal tasks, but also as that which ‘ “stirs and strives” ’, which ‘assails andenthralls us (als das, was ‘webt und strebt’, uns überfällt) as landscape’ oras ‘flowers in the hedgerow’ [SZ 70]. This second approach brings intoquestion the analysis of Zuhandenheit. For if one can happily defend the



claim that the wind in the sails is something other for the fishermanthan what it is for the scientist in the meteorological station, or that thefarmer’s ‘springhead in the dale’ is other than the geologist’s ‘source of ariver’, because and insofar as both wind and springhead are situatedwithin a referential context, then it is much more difficult to under-stand how a nature which ‘stirs’, ‘strives’ and ‘enthrals’ could at all beunderstood in such a context, as pointing beyond itself within a horizonof finality. In the terms of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, for example, suchan experience of nature would be the preserve of aesthetic judgement; amodality of judgement that is, precisely, without interest, that is in noway a simple judgement of finality.15

If one were to suggest that a landscape or a being such as a flower isstared at, intuited, rather than being pre-thematically apprehended –regardless of whether this pre-thematic apprehension could be inter-preted according to the idea of Zuhandenheit – in §15 Heidegger wouldseem to disagree, since he writes that nature remains ‘hidden (verborgen)’[SZ 70] by the perception of things as vorhanden. In §43, however, wefind a remark that recognises the true extent of the problem. For notevery

Vorhandenheit is a Dingvorhandenheit. The ‘Nature’ that embraces(umfängt) us is, of course, an entity within the world; but the kind ofbeing which it shows belongs neither to the Zuhandenen nor to theVorhandenen in the sense of ‘Naturdinglichkeit’ [SZ 211].

There would be, then, a nature, or a natural being which would not havethe being of Naturdinglichkeit, a natural thingliness; a Vorhandenheit, apresence before the eyes of a nature, that would not be the nature of themodern natural sciences. This remark stands only as a question, how-ever, and in Being and Time the play of inverted commas within whichthe question of ‘nature’ is approached is never settled or resolved.

In the footnote to the essay of 1929 ‘On the Essence of Ground’,Heidegger returns to this question of nature. If ‘nature is missing’ withinthe analytic of Dasein, then there are ‘reasons for this’:

The decisive reason lies in the fact that nature does not let itself beencountered either within the sphere of the environing world, nor ingeneral as something toward which we comport ourselves. Nature is orig-inally manifest through Dasein’s existing as finding itself attuned inthe midst of beings. But insofar as finding oneself [Befindlichkeit]belongs to the essence of Dasein, and comes to be expressed in the



unity of the full concept of care, it is only here that the basis for theproblem of nature can first be attained [G9 155/370].

In opposition to §43 of Being and Time, nature is here no longer to bethought as a sort of innerworldly being. It is manifest instead throughthe transcendental horizon of world. Yet, not by means of world in theguise of a horizon of equipmental references, but rather world thoughtaccording to Dasein’s affectivity or Befindlichkeit. In Being and TimeHeidegger will, in fact, go on to show how world constitutes the horizonof Dasein’s affectivity and mood (Stimmung);16 through its moods Daseindiscovers the beings that it is not and discloses its own being to itself ina manner that is irreducible to and prior to any thematic cognition.Worldhood, thus, will indeed be interpreted from different perspectiveswithin the framework of fundamental ontology. The horizon of finalityis but one aspect of the structure of worldhood itself, and Dasein is cer-tainly not only a being-in-the-world in using equipment; if the pureperception of things as vorhanden is achieved as a ‘certain un-worlding(bestimmte Entweltlichung)’ [SZ 65] of the world, then this un-worlding,as Heidegger states in 1925, does not mean that there is a simple disap-pearance of the world, but rather only that the world shows itself in a‘deficient meaningfulness’ [G20 300/219]. Nevertheless, the attempt tointerpret the being of nature in terms of world in 1929 is problematicand demonstrative of a philosopher grappling with a problem for whichthere is no ready solution. For the question of nature is here approachedin abstraction from the categories of Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit,whereas a solution to the problem will only be found, as the fifthchapter of this study will show, with an ontological determination ofthe innerworldly being beyond both categories, which occurs withHeidegger’s discovery of earth.

Recognising, in any event, that the structure of worldhood is indeednot exhausted by its determination as the work-world grants further justi-fication to the claim that the analysis of equipment constitutes more of ameans than an end within the analytic of Dasein. Certainly, if this analy-sis is a means, then it is not simply a means. Heidegger, of course, writesof it in 1929 as being of ‘subordinate significance’ rather than as a philo-sophical tool that could be discarded. One might hazard – in venturinginto the domain of psychology – that it is because of the end that it servesthat Heidegger generally seems to be quite convinced of its truth as a cat-egorical determination of the being of innerworldly beings, despite theproblems it encounters. Yet the orientation of the analysis of Zuhandenheittowards the quite particular form of human comportment that is manual



production has a deeper and more historical source. This source is Greekontology and the philosophy of Aristotle in particular. And it is in deter-mining exactly how Heidegger returns to the latter that it will becomeclear why any form of psychology remains at an infinite distance from thehistorical stakes and significance of the account of equipment.

2.2 The ground-laying of the productive horizon of Greek ontology

The preceding chapter of this study examined Heidegger’s concern toreveal a ‘horizon of production’ that is constitutive of the philosophicalproblematic of Greek ontology. In order to determine the exact mannerin which the account of equipment is to be understood as a repetition ofthis horizon of production, however, it is necessary to turn briefly to thesense of the concept of Vorhandenheit as it is discussed within the geneal-ogy of the concepts of existence and essence to be found in the lecturecourse of 1927 entitled The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. The geneal-ogy, articulated in the second section of the lecture course, provides uswith a central element of the attempt to provide a ‘birth-certificate’ forancient ontology that Heidegger had sketched in §6 of Being and Timeand that was to appear in the unrealised second part of the project of thetext itself.

The concepts of essence and existence are, in Descartes words,‘omnibus nota’17 in philosophy, perennial concepts in philosophy. AsHeidegger puts it within the lectures: ‘to each being the what-questionand the whether-question apply. At first we do not know why this is so.In the philosophical tradition it is taken as self-evident’ [G24 123–24/88].After attempting a positive interpretation of Kant’s negatively statedthesis that being or existence is not a real predicate in the first section ofthe lecture course, Heidegger returns to the undisputed ground of themedieval dispute concerning the unity and distinction of essence andexistence in finite beings in the second. This ground is given in the mostdecisive terms in which the distinction between the finite being andGod is expressed: the ens increatum and the ens creatum. The finite beingis the creature in the proper sense of the term, that which has been cre-ated by God. The finite being consists of an essence, a what-being,which insofar as it is existent, has been actualised or made actual byGod. Existence is here understood as actualitas, as actuality, as the resultof an acting or action. As Heidegger stresses, the concept of actualitasitself signifies that ‘something exists if it is actu … on the basis of an



agere, a Wirken, a working, operating or effecting’ [G24 122–23/87].Moreover, the Latin etymological roots of the term existentia are ex-sistere,or ex alio sistere, which means to stand outside of another being, namelyits cause.18 Thus:

the verbal definition of existentia already made clear that actualitasrefers back to an acting on the part of some indefinite subject or, if westart from our own terminology, that the extant [das Vorhandene] issomehow referred by its sense to something for which, as it were, itcomes to be before the hand, [vor die Hand kommt] at hand, to behandled [für das es ein Handliches ist] [G24 143/101].

Before having a causal relation to other beings, the particular being itselfhas been made existent. It is not without reason, then, that the Germanterm that Heidegger uses as an ‘interpretative expression’ of existentiashould have a reference to the hand, since the existence of a being is herethe result of a production or creation – a miracle of creation performed,as might be said, by the hand of God. Yet if medieval philosophy caninterpret the concepts of existence and existence from this theologicalperspective of production as if as a matter of course, then this resultsfrom the fact that the Greek ontology from which it develops alreadyissues from such a horizon of production. The preceding chapter exam-ined this argument but it is necessary to add here that in Heidegger’s dis-course Vorhandenheit serves to translate, with Anwesenheit, the Greekousia; the former German word stressing the being-produced of beings,the latter their being-present. Thus, as Heidegger writes, ‘the verbs ,�ναι,esse, existere must be interpreted by way of οSσ�α, the Vorhandene as theAnwesende’ [G24 109/153].

Upon the delimitation of a technical horizon constitutive of Greekand medieval ontology, in the second section of the lecture course theprincipal task of a critical engagement with this ontology is described interms of a ‘restriction and modification’ of the thesis according to whichessence and existence belong to the ontological constitution of eachbeing. There is a need for a ‘foundation’ or ‘justification’ (Begründung) ofthis thesis ‘as to its limited validity to beings in the sense of the Vorhandene’[G24 157/111].19 In short, Heidegger’s claim is that the being of Daseinmust be interpreted beyond the concepts of existence and essence, andthe following chapter will approach this question more directly. Thefurther task, however, is one of providing a ‘founding-argument’ for thetechnical horizon of Greek ontology. For Greek ontology would interpret



beings from a perspective of production without explicitly elaboratingthe sense and the necessity of such a perspective within ontologicalinquiry itself. Thus:

only when the founding argument [Begründung] is given is a legiti-mate birth certificate issued for the ontological concepts of essentiaand existentia which grew out of this way of posing ontological prob-lems. The grounding [Begründung] of the horizon described above forthe interpretation of beings with regard to their essentia and existentiacan be carried out only by making intelligible from the most distinc-tive constitution of Dasein’s being why Dasein primarily and for themost part has to understand the being of beings in the horizon ofproductive-intuitive comportment. We must ask: What function doesthe comportment of producing and using in the broadest sense havewithin Dasein itself? The answer is possible only if the constitution ofDasein’s being is first brought to light in its general basic features, thatis, if the ontology of Dasein is made secure [G24 164/117].

It is to be remarked that a quite particular use of the idea of a ‘birth-certificate’ of metaphysics is evident in this passage: the birth-certificateis not merely the unearthing of the horizons of experience at the incep-tion of philosophy, but a founding argument that is, in the end, nothingbut the analytic of Dasein. In any event, given that this analysis is toquestion productive comportment and ‘using in the broadest sense’, it isclear that the analysis of equipment is offered as an attempt to ground orto found more originally the productive horizon of Greek ontology.

The analytic of Dasein must show, in fact, that the Vorhandenheit of thefinished product is a secondary, derivative determination of its being,since things are originally encountered as ready-to-hand. In the course ofthe genealogy, however, Heidegger uses the term Vorhandenheit in apotentially confusing sense that denominates not only that which isproduced, but also the product in its use as that which is available, dis-posable. Ousia itself already denominates the ‘equipment which we useand the natural products with which we constantly have to do [dasgebrauchte Zeug und die ständig genützten Erzeugnisse der Natur]’ [G24153/108], and a being in the Greek sense is, thus, a vorhandenesVerfügbares, that which is available and at our disposal. The term verfüg-bar only draws out here what is already contained in the termVorhandenheit itself. Yet this does not mean that ‘Vorhandenheit appearshere clearly as an original category which has in no way a need to befounded on Zuhandenheit, of which it would be a deficient mode’20 as



Jean-François Courtine has argued. For Heidegger qualifies the argumentas follows:

Concerning its Vorhandenheit the Vorhandene is conceived of ontolog-ically not so much with regard to its disposability for use or withregard to productive, or practical comportment in general, but ratherwith regard to the finding-present [Vorfinden] of that which is dispos-able [G24 153/109].

The terminology could appear confusing for the reader of Being and Timesince here Vorhandenheit expresses an idea of disposability in general. Yetif the terms of the argument are problematic, the argument itself is clear:the Greeks, namely Plato and Aristotle, were not able to think the utilityor availability of the product in an original way because they deter-mined it as that which is found before the eyes, as that which is appre-hended in a beholding intuition. The same argument is, in effect,articulated in §15 of Being and Time:

The Greeks had an appropriate term for ‘Things’: πρbγματα – that isto say, that which one has to do with in one’s concernful dealings(πρdξι�). But ontologically, the specifically ‘pragmatic’ character ofthe πρbγματα is just what the Greeks left in obscurity; they thoughtof these ‘proximally’ as ‘mere Things’ [SZ 68].

It is, however, necessary to gloss this argument, for Heidegger’s morespecific claim, as we have seen, is that Plato and Aristotle never recognisedthe specifically pragmatic character of the finished product. The ‘mereThing’, in other words, is thought within Greek ontology from theperspective of the finished product. Heidegger attempts to stress this ina handwritten note in the margins of his own copy of Being and Time,and not without cause, since the fact that it was not stressed in 1927 hasnot helped commentators to recognise in the account of equipmentsomething other than a positive philosophical position.21

The meaning and possibility of this argument concerning Greekontology, however, can be fully clarified only in determining exactly themanner in which Heidegger achieves an analysis of Zuhandenheit by rad-icalising Aristotle’s thinking. In the sixth book of the Nicomachean EthicsAristotle writes:

Thought by itself however moves nothing, but only thought directedto an end, and dealing with action. This indeed is the origin or cause



of productive activity also, since he who makes something always hassome further end for something or someone (πρ�� τι και τινο�) inview: the act of making is not an end in itself, it is only a means, andbelongs to something else. Whereas a thing done (τ� πρακτ�ν) is anend in itself: since doing well (,Sπραξíα) is the End, and it is at thisthat desire aims [1139a35–b4].

The basic point to note here is that the distinction between poiesis andpraxis advanced by Aristotle seems to be effaced in the analytic ofDasein. For Aristotle, the end of poiesis is beyond poiesis itself since thefinished product is always for someone and something, for the use towhich it can be put. Praxis, on the contrary, is an end in itself since thedeed or action is its own end; acting well is the end of action itself. Asopposed to production, which is the carrying out of a task that I may ormay not want to do, in praxis the human being explicitly discloses thefor-the-sake-of-which, the ο (υ ;ν,κα [1142b16] of its own actions.Within the analytic of Dasein, however, our everyday dealings, whichHeidegger relates to the Greek praxis in the last passage cited from Beingand Time, is determined, as was noted in the preceding section, from theperspective of productive comportment or poiesis itself. For Heidegger,production always and already has its end in itself even if it is someoneelse who will use the finished product; if I produce something for some-one, this act of producing is still a function of my own purposes, andthus it is always and already for the sake of myself, however inexplicitor, to cite Being and Time, inauthentic the apprehension of this for-the-sake-of-which may be. The analytic of Dasein thus synthesises poiesisand praxis, and it should be noted that this synthesis in fact adds thepractical conception of the for-the-sake-of-which to a radicalised versionof Aristotle’s poietic account of causality. For the other structural itemsconstitutive of referentiality that §15 delineates can be understood tocorrespond to three of the Aristotelian four causes. Most obviously, theidea of the work-material as the always and already zuhanden corre-sponds to the idea of what is rendered in Latin as the causa materialis, asthe material from which something is made. Less obviously, and second,the idea of the ‘towards-which’ corresponds to the causa formalis, whichis the form that is first envisioned by the producer and then realised inthe material. In this connection, it is necessary to note that if Heideggercould not deny the necessity of first mentally envisioning what we areto produce, then he would nevertheless argue that in the course of pro-duction the producer is orientated by a less thematic understanding ofwhat she is attempting to realise. Third, when Heidegger writes that the



‘towards-which’ ‘has in its turn the kind of being of equipment’ [SZ 70],he can be understood to take up the traditional idea of the causa finalisas the end or purpose that the product itself is to serve.

The above remarks concerning the fusion and radicalisation of poiesisand praxis within the analytic of Dasein do not, however, address thequestion of what resources could be drawn for a thinking ofZuhandenheit from Aristotle’s work itself. For despite the apparently crit-ical tone of the passage above from Being and Time and of The BasicProblems of Phenomenology, earlier in the 1920s Heidegger had offeredmore generous readings. In the lecture course of 1924 entitled Plato’sSophist, for example, Heidegger interprets Aristotle’s determination ofthe product’s being ‘for something or someone’ in the above passagefrom the Nicomachean Ethics as a statement of the product’s having a‘reference (Verweisung) to something else’ [G19 41/29]. Similarly, inanother lecture course of the same year, Fundamental Concepts of Aristotle’sPhilosophy, within a reading of Aristotle’s Rhetoric Heidegger translatesthe term τ� συμφNρον, which one ordinarily renders as the expedient,as Beiträglich – Beiträglichkeit or conduciveness being one of the fourmodalities of the referentiality of equipment enumerated in §15 of Beingand Time – and he adds that ‘a Beiträgliches is in itself such a being thathas a reference to something’ [G18 58]. Would this mean, then, thatAristotle has somehow apprehended the referentiality of the being in itsuse, that is, the Zuhandenheit of the product? It is necessary to bring tolight here Heidegger’s changing responses to this question and the dif-ferent ways that he approaches it.

First of all, in the essay of 1922 entitled Phenomenological Interpretationswith Respect to Aristotle, Heidegger attempts to show, with regard to thediscussion of accidental being in Metaphysics Epsilon, that Aristotle hasindirectly encountered, and yet passed over, the referentiality of equip-ment. Aristotle writes:

The producer of a house does not produce all the attributes that areaccidental to the house in its construction; for they are infinite innumber. There is no reason why the house so produced should not beagreeable to some, injurious to others, and different from perhapsevery other existing thing; but the act of building is productive ofnone of these [1026b8].

The builder builds the house according to a plan, a plan that may be mod-ified according to the particular needs of the client. Yet this plan is thelimit of the builder’s knowledge and it is not within his powers to know if



the inhabitants will find the finished house agreeable or disagreeable.Such characteristics as the agreeable or disagreeable are, in modern parl-ance, merely subjective and they are that which lie beyond the purviewof any determinate knowledge; they are that with which ‘no science,whether practical, productive or speculative, concerns itself’ [1026b5–6].On Heidegger’s reading, however, the idea of the agreeable or disagree-able articulates a conception, however indirectly, of the being of thehouse in its use. Yet, the fact that Aristotle can write of such characteris-tics as merely the accidental shows that the environing world is at onceapprehended and lost in Aristotle, that it is only indirectly seen, becauseof the primacy of a determinate sense of being, namely ‘being-produced’.What is, is ‘originally present as that which it is only for the productivedealings; it is already no longer present within the kind of dealingswhich make use of it, insofar as these dealings can bring the finishedobject into diverse, no longer primordial aspects of care’ [PIA 52/392].Aristotle would think being as being-produced, then, without breakingthrough to an ontological thinking of the product in its use.

Such an interpretation would seem to prefigure the claims thatHeidegger makes in 1927. Yet within this same text, and until at least1924, Heidegger attempts to read the concepts of dunamis and energeia,‘actuality’ and ‘possibility’, in terms of the analysis of Zuhandenheit. Thefact that matter such as planks of wood are, on Aristotle’s account,potentially a table, means that the wood ‘refers to something’ [G18 300],namely the form of the table that it can possibly adopt. The wood hasthe characteristic of Dienlichsein or Verwendbarkeit, a being useful orbeing-able-to-be-used for something. This interpretation is developed inthe most telling fashion within a lecture course of 1926 entitled TheFundamental Concepts of Ancient Philosophy, with the addition, in theevent, of a third term to the duality of Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit.The work-material encountered through our use of tools has a ‘readi-ness’ and a being ‘appropriate-for (Eignung-zu)’ [G22 173] that consti-tutes its Vorhandenheit, which is here to be understood in the sense ofthe always and already zuhanden of Being and Time. Upon the fulfilmentof the movement of production, a being-in-movement that is itsUnterhandenheit, a being ‘under-the-hand’, the product achieves its ent-elechia, its having-itself-in-its-end in the form of the finished product.Yet Heidegger seeks to distinguish entelechia from energeia.22 Althoughthe two terms are more often than not rigorously synonymous inAristotle, energeia can designate the being-in-work of a being in the senseof its function or activity.23 Thus, for Heidegger, upon its being-finishedthe product is available for a use, available to be put to work as zuhanden



and this is its energeia. The ‘actuality’ of which Aristotle speaks in relationto the finished product could be understood, therefore, as Zuhandenheit.

Heidegger, then, provides different responses in the course of the1920s to the question of whether an account of Zuhandenheit can beretrieved from Aristotle. It is on the basis of these arguments concerningequipment, and thus the referential horizon of world, that one canunderstand the movement in Heidegger’s arguments as to the possibil-ity of the retrieval of a conception of world and being-in-the-world fromAristotle. In 1924, Heidegger even goes so far as to argue that Aristotlehas apprehended the basic ontological structure of human being,namely its being-in-the-world; if the human being is the animal that haslanguage, the term ζωx is to be interpreted as signifying being-in-the-world. To be sure, upon rendering the Greek word as In-einer-Welt-sein,Heidegger immediately acknowledges the force of the interpretationwith the following remark to his audience: ‘Perhaps you are of the opin-ion that this is read into Aristotle, but perhaps you will also see thatinterpretation is nothing other than the bringing to light of what is notthere (Heraustellen dessen, was nicht da steht)’ [G18 66]. This is probablyHeidegger’s most extreme formulation of the very task of historical andphilosophical interpretation, in a lecture course, Fundamental Conceptsof Aristotle’s Philosophy, that presents his most generous readings of theStagirite. Yet Aristotle can write in On the Soul that J ψυχy τn �ντα π+�Rστιν,24 that the soul is in a certain sense (all) beings, and if one translatesπ%� as ‘how’, Aristotle can be understood to state that the soul is the‘how’ of beings, the modality in and by which beings as such exist. Ratherthan being an expression of Aristotle’s alleged naive realism, as manymodern commentators have had it,25 this would be an articulation, forthe Heidegger of 1924, of a thinking of Dasein’s being-in-the-world.

In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology of 1927, however, Heideggerleaves to one side the Greek concept of world since it ‘could be set forthonly by way of an interpretation of Greek existence’ [G24 155/110].Although Aristotle does not explicitly articulate a conception of world asa moment of the ontological structure of being-human, an understandingof the experience of world that underlies his thinking would require us tolook beyond the letter of the Aristotelian corpus to, first of all, pre-Socraticthinking and particularly to Heraclitus.26 Yet, in the end, Heidegger recog-nises that his earlier and more generous interpretations of referentialityand worldhood in Aristotle are over-interpretations. This is why he canwrite in 1927 that the ‘concept of world, and the phenomenon which itdesignates are what philosophy in general has not yet recognised’[G24 234/165].



Of course, Aristotle even apprehends the fundamental role of thehand in the manipulation of the tool in describing it as a sort of instru-ment for which there exist others: �ργανον πρ� ,ργbνων.27 Yet, onceagain, the original being of the product, its Zuhandenheit, cannot be con-ceived in determining the innerworldly being as what is present before theeyes. Consequently, one can say, as does Rémi Brague succinctly, thatwithin the analytic of Dasein ‘what Aristotle says is rethought from amore original grasp of the phenomenon intended’.28 This more originalgrasp of the phenomenon is the interpretation of world as a horizon ofreferentiality.

2.3 Metaphysics in its repetition

Does not this absolute primacy of equipmentality awaken a cer-tain suspicion […]. That Dasein must work in order to exist inthe fullest sense, is this not a trait that comes to it from theessence of technology?

Michel Haar29

The first section of this chapter showed how the analysis of equipmentin Being and Time is already more than a simple description of experi-ence insofar as it serves to gain access to the structure of worldhood byradicalising the phenomenological conception of intentionality. Thesecond section of the chapter has shown that the analysis has another,more profound and more historical ‘purpose’, in that it seeks to re-appropriate, and provide a birth certificate for, the Greek inception ofmetaphysics. We have seen, in fact, that in the course of the 1920sHeidegger moves from the claim that an account of the Zuhandenheit ofthe finished product is to be found in Aristotle to arguing for the neces-sity of a radicalisation or ground-laying of his thinking. On the basis ofthese findings, the very least that must be recognised is that the accountof equipment in Being and Time is in no way a Heideggerian invention.The account is instead determined by the inception of metaphysics.Despite his well-founded suspicions concerning this account, therefore,nothing could be further from the truth than Michel Haar’s remarkablyun-Heideggerian claim that ‘in Sein und Zeit, analysing equipmentalityfor example, he [Heidegger] abstracted as much from his own time asfrom the structures bequeathed by history’. It is no more coherent toargue, as the author does at the risk of contradicting himself, that theanalysis of equipment derives ‘from a historical period of transitionbetween the world of the artisan and the industrial world of the beginning



of 19th century’.30 Understood in this latter sense Heidegger wouldsimply be reactionary. The analysis is rather an attempt to rethink orradicalise Greek ontology, an attempt to demonstrate the truth of theinception of metaphysics. It derives neither from a reactionary refusal ofmodern industrial technology nor from a pragmatic worldview; and thepragmatic misinterpretation of Being and Time consists not only inneglecting the question of being but also in holding pragmatism to be amodern discovery. Insofar as it fails to apprehend the sense of the tech-nical horizon constitutive of Greek ontology, and in looking toHeidegger solely for a corroboration of its own ‘findings’, modern prag-matism is nothing less than metaphysics without roots, a metaphysicsthat does not understand its own historical origins and possibility.

In Heidegger’s reduction to equipmentality, to cite Rémi Brague onceagain, ‘what Aristotle says is rethought from a more original grasp of thephenomenon intended’. Yet this more original grasp only draws outwhat is already implied and harboured in Greek ontology itself. Inrecognising this, it becomes impossible to hold, with Hubert Dreyfus,that this reduction represents a historical stage of metaphysics. Far frombeing a stage in the history of metaphysics, the reduction to equipmen-tality is already a de-construction of this history insofar as it brings itsinception back to what it itself implies and thus to its original truth. It isnecessary to add here that if this reduction were a stage in the history ofmetaphysics it would be a rather peculiar one given that it endures inHeidegger’s work only from the beginning of the 1920s to the middle ofthe 1930s, and that it would be a stage that would not correspond in anyway to the technological twentieth century itself. Dreyfus is notwrong, of course, to point to the proximity between the reduction ofnature to a natural resource in Being and Time and the delimitation ofthe Rhine as a source of hydraulic pressure at our command in ‘TheQuestion Concerning Technology’.31 This proximity is not accidental.Yet it results from the fact that the reduction to equipmentality attemptsto show the truth of the Platonic–Aristotelian determination of beings.The determination of beings as the actuality of formed matter is, in truth,already a reduction of what is to its utility, to what can be used and pro-duced. Only on these grounds is it possible to understand that the objec-tive determination of beings in modernity that, as Heidegger will argue,occurs as a reduction of what is to what can be dominated, controlledand rendered instrumental does not occur simply as a perversion of thetradition that has preceded it.

My contention is, then, that it is solely by understanding the reduc-tion to equipmentality in Being and Time as the origin of metaphysics in



its repetition that this reduction can be understood in its relation toHeidegger’s later delimitation of modern technology. In the movementfrom Being and Time to Heidegger’s work of the 1930s and beyond thereis no change of positive philosophical positions, no correction of onepositive thesis – a positive thesis that would have a certain ‘debt’ toAristotle – by another that would be nicer, as it were, to nature and moreresponsive to contemporary ecology, but a leading back of metaphysicsto its own presuppositions, which itself leads to the possibility of a moreessential delimitation, an ‘overcoming’, of metaphysics itself. Any talk,however well intentioned it may be, of a Heidegger I and a Heidegger IIcan only obscure this movement. Not only would it seem to lead us toassume that here two different philosophical positions are in question,but also in this way we speak of the beginning and the end of a move-ment, rather than grasping the movement itself that underlies and is thecondition of both; but, of course, as any reader of Aristotle knows, and aswe will see in the following chapter, grasping movement as movement isa most difficult task.

If the analysis of Zuhandenheit in Being and Time is more of a meansthan an end in itself insofar as it enables phenomenology to gain accessto the structure of world, then it is also, and more profoundly, a ‘means’insofar as it serves to reduce the inception of metaphysics to its owntruth. Of course, in this second sense, much more so than in the first,the idea of ‘means’ and ‘ends’ or ‘purposes’ is problematic. To gain someclarification of the problem it is necessary to underline that my argu-ment here does not constitute a denial of the fact that Heidegger holdsthe analysis of Zuhandenheit to constitute an essential phenomenologicaladvance in the 1920s. Without doubt the author holds the analysis to bean ‘essential gain’ notwithstanding the problems that it encounters inrelation to the question of nature. In other words, the fact that thereduction to equipmentality is metaphysics in its repetition does notmean that Heidegger thinks at the time that it is any the less true. Thereduction is not a mere strategy, simply a means and thus somethinglike a negative philosophical position. This is why Being and Time canoffer the account of equipmentality without deliberately stating thestakes of it as a repetition of the productive horizon of the inception ofmetaphysics.

It has been argued that fundamental ontology offers something akinto a negative value judgement concerning equipment insofar as itdistinguishes between the authentic and inauthentic modes of Dasein’sexistence. Jacques Taminiaux, for one, reads this distinction as an oppo-sition between two ‘fields’ of existence:32 either Dasein is involved with



equipment and other people in the world as inauthentic, or it heeds thecall of its conscience in a supposedly authentic isolation from thesepeople and these things. The distinction between the two modalities ofexistence would, therefore, be one between the public and the private,between a public life and the purity of a quasi-Platonic dialogue of thesoul with itself, within which Dasein would disclose itself as a solus-ipse. Thus, for Taminiaux, Heidegger is, in the end, quite peculiarly un-Aristotelian and it ‘goes without saying within the framework offundamental ontology that it is by a sort of distraction, … by a sort ofletting slip of our most proper possibility that we pay attention tothings’. On this basis one can only go on to remark, as the author does,an apparent ‘rehabilitation’33 of poiesis and the use of equipment in ‘TheOrigin of the Work of Art’. Not only the creation of artworks but also theproduction and the use of equipment would now be seen as an authenticpossibility of human existence.

Taminiaux’s reading is problematic in many ways, not least because itviews the turning that occurs in Heidegger’s thinking as a change ofvalue judgement concerning the use of equipment. More funda-mentally, however, the reading of Being and Time itself is untenable.Certainly, Dasein can certainly disclose itself as a solus ipse, butHeidegger’s qualification of these terms has nevertheless to be takenseriously:

this existential ‘solipsism’ is so far from the displacement of puttingan isolated subject-Thing into the innocuous emptiness of a world-less occurring that in an extreme sense what it does is precisely tobring Dasein face to face with its world as world, and thus bring it faceto face with itself as a being-in-the-world [SZ 188].

Moreover, how could it go without saying that we achieve authenticityin a splendid but ultimately nihilistic isolation from the things andpeople of the world when Being and Time states that Dasein’s authenticity‘discloses the current situation of the “there” in such a way that exis-tence, in taking action, is circumspectively concerned with what isfactically ready-to-hand environmentally’ [SZ 326]?

There is no negative value judgement concerning equipment withinthe framework of fundamental ontology, and if we are to understand thesense of the reduction to equipmentality it is necessary to recognise thatHeidegger’s intentions and his own reflections on the sense of funda-mental ontology at the time are not at all what is significant. What issignificant is rather what the work itself does, what it achieves; and



what it achieves is, precisely, a leading back of metaphysics to its ownpresuppositions, to its own truth. Concerning the passage from Meditationto which I referred for a second time in the introduction to this chapter,there is, without doubt, the violence of a retrospective self-interpretationinherent in the further claim that fundamental ontology seeks to bringmetaphysics back to its own presuppositions in order to lead metaphysicsto its own transformation. If Heidegger’s work of the 1920s were offeredin order to attain the work of the 1930s, he would already know thethinking to be attained by the path that his thought has yet to travel,and, thus, the very idea of a path of his thinking would be reduced tonought. As Jean Beaufret reminds us, ‘one should not imagine thateverything is contemporaneous in Heidegger’s thinking. It is a questionof a path which invents itself as it advances’.34

In order to determine adequately the limits of fundamental ontologyand how these limits lead to Heidegger’s later work, it is necessary toreturn briefly to the question of Vorhandenheit. If the term does notmerely signify the being as intuited or perceived before the eyes, but also,as a translation of ousia and existentia, denominates the produced andthe producible, and finally that which is available or disposable, thenwhat is the sense of Vorhandenheit in relation to modern philosophy?What, in other words, is the connection between modern metaphysicsand Greek hylo-morphism? How has modern philosophy inherited thetechnical horizon at the inception of metaphysics? What does it mean, asHeidegger will argue from 1922 onwards, that the concepts ‘which werefixed for the first time in Greek ontology and which later faded out andbecame formalised, that is to say, became part of the tradition and arenow handled like worn out coins’ [G24 152/108]?

I have already indicated that in Being and Time Vorhandenheit denom-inates the being as it is methodologically determined by the modernsciences of nature in addition to the being merely intuited. It is not,however, until §69 that Heidegger explicitly questions modern scien-tific method. The first section of the paragraph attempts to provide atemporal interpretation of Dasein’s circumspective concern, and thusof Zuhandenheit. The aim is to show that this modality of the being ofinnerworldly beings has its ground and possibility in Dasein’s temporal-ity. Consequently, the second section is concerned with ‘The TemporalSense of the Way in which Circumspective Concern becomes Modified into theTheoretical Discovery of the Vorhandene’. Both senses of the word theory aremeant here: the aim is at once to provide a temporal interpretation ofperception or intuition, and to provide an ‘existential concept of sci-ence’, to account for the ‘ontological genesis’ [SZ 356] of theoretical



comportment in the sense of scientific method. To this end, however,Heidegger focuses on the ontical genesis of scientific method in referringto ‘the classic example of the historical development of a science’,namely the emergence of modern mathematical physics. Within ananalysis that will be reiterated in the 1930s,35 for Heidegger, the particu-larity of this modern science rests neither in an increased attention tothe facts, nor in the application, after the fact, of mathematics to nature,but rather ‘in the way in which nature herself is mathematically projected’:

In this projection something constantly Vorhandenes (matter) isuncovered beforehand, and the horizon is opened so that one may beguided by looking at those constitutive items in it that are quantita-tively determinable (motion, force, location, and time). Only ‘in thelight’ of a Nature which has been projected in this fashion can any-thing like a ‘fact’ be found and set up for an experiment regulatedand delimited in terms of this projection [SZ 363].

It is not altogether clear whether matter is an intrinsic or merely anextrinsic determination of Vorhandenheit here, but the mathematicalprojection or objectification of nature would establish, for Heidegger, ana priori determination of entities as such. As an a priori projection, how-ever, the modern mathematical projection of nature only determinesthe truth of the being that is perceived. This is why, in interpreting thetemporal sense of Vorhandenheit, Heidegger seems to reduce being-perceived to being-objectified. The ‘objectification of beings’ is charac-terised by a

specific kind of making present (ausgezeichnete Gegenwärtigung). Thismaking-present is distinguished from the Present (Gegenwart) of cir-cumspective circumspection in that – above all – the kind of discov-ering which belongs to the science in question awaits solely thediscoveredness of the Vorhandene [SZ 363].

Heidegger’s thinking verges on the paradoxical here: on the one hand,the attempt is made to give an existential and hence temporal interpre-tation of the modern mathematical objectification of nature, which initself tells us nothing about the specificity of this objectification asopposed to the simple perception of beings. This only shows us, how-ever, that an existential interpretation of science in terms of Dasein’stemporality will, in the end, be fruitless, that is, quite impossible. On theother hand, the historical originality of the modern mathematical



objectification of beings is recognised, only for it to be determined asa priori, and hence, at least in any traditional sense of the terms, assomething essentially unhistorical.

In effect, this difficulty shows us that in relation to the historicalquestion of Vorhandenheit fundamental ontology itself cannot adequatelyaddress the questions that it itself raises. The remarks in §69 of Being andTime concerning the technical equipment involved in modern scientificactivity – remarks that do not think technology in a sense that would befaithful to the Greek techne as a mode of knowing36 – demonstrate thatfundamental ontology is far from being able to think the relation oftechne to the modern sciences. Yet if it is unable to think this, and unableto see anything else in the modern mathematical projection of naturethan the truth of what is, then this is because it has no other site fromwhich the distance could be gained for a critical perspective on thisprojection. For as much as fundamental ontology seeks to reveal howthe very idea of matter arises within an ontological reduction of theinnerworldly being to that which is used and used up, as the origin ofmetaphysics in its repetition it has no critical distance from the traditionthat it repeats. This site and this distance arise only upon the discoveryof what we might call the extra-metaphysical ‘principle’ of phusis thatHeidegger discovers in the pre-Socratics. Although fundamental ontologyalready points, in and from itself, to this thinking insofar as the repetitionof the productive horizon of Greek ontology opens up the possibility ofa return to a thinking wherein beings are not conceived within such ahorizon, this discovery, as will become clear, is only achieved througha phenomenological reflection on the work of art.

At the beginning of the ‘Zähringen Seminar’ of 1973 Jean Beaufretasks Heidegger how it was possible to describe the analysis of equip-mentality as an ‘essential gain’ in Being and Time and as merely of‘subordinate significance’ only two years later. Heidegger respondsneither immediately nor directly. In the course of the seminar, however,he offers the following remarks concerning the repetition of the Greeksin the 1920s:

Already in Being and Time there is such a return (Rückkehr), although itis still slightly clumsy (ungeschickt). In Being and Time, in fact, this occursas a Destruction, that is to say as a dismantling, a de-structuration of thatwhich, from the beginning, is destined as being in the uninterruptedsuccession of transformations that is the history of philosophy. But inBeing and Time there had not yet taken place a genuine knowledge ofthe history of being, whence arises the awkwardness and, in truth, the



naïvety of the ‘ontological destruction’. Since then, this necessarynaïvety has given way to a knowledge [VS 133].

Being and Time was already a destruction, a dismantling of the philo-sophical tradition, yet it was naive or clumsy, ungeschickt, which is tosay, unhistorical, not yet properly historical. Heidegger deliberately playshere on the relation of the word ungeschickt to ‘Geschick’, which means‘destiny’ or ‘fate’ and to ‘Geschichte’ which means ‘history’. This naivetyof fundamental ontology is to be thought not only in relation to the‘not yet’ of a return to the phusis of pre-Socratic thought and the ‘notyet’ of a questioning of modern technology but also in relation to theinability to think adequately, even if it can name it, the ‘essential devia-tion’ [G24 168/119] that Greek ontology endures through its transmis-sion in the Latinate tradition. By means of a reflection on the work of artin the 1930s, and, more specifically, by means of a reflection on the tra-ditional idea of efficient causality, Heidegger will in fact return toAristotle to show that the horizon of production that determines it hasa truth prior to any mere utility. Yet this does not mean, as the fifthchapter of this study will argue, that fundamental ontology is wrong orfalse, but only that it shows the truth of the tradition of which Greekontology is the origin, that is, the truth of the Latinate transmission ofGreek philosophy.



3Time and Motion

As the second section of the preceding chapter indicated, fundamentalontology sets itself the task of restricting the sphere of validity of Greekontology in showing that the ontology of ousia is valid only, and to alimited degree given the analysis of Zuhandenheit, for the beings that weare not, for innerworldly beings. One might say that if both the con-cepts of existence and essence derive from an interpretation of the fin-ished product, then in distinguishing human Existenz from the sphere ofthe categorial, phenomenology must show that Dasein never is a fin-ished product. Although we may describe someone who has attained acertain degree of excellence in this way, for Heidegger Dasein is alwaysand already ahead of itself because its Existenz is what he terms a ‘being-possible (Möglichsein)’ or a ‘potentiality-for-being (Seinkönnen)’ [SZ 143].

In order to clarify these terms, and before relating them to the work ofAristotle, it should first be noted that with such a thinking of potential-ity or possibility Heidegger moves beyond Kant’s determination of it asa category of modality, as a mere ‘empty logical possibility’, which ‘sig-nifies what is not yet actual and what is not at any time necessary’ [SZ 143].Of course, Kant makes a further distinction between the logical possibil-ity of a concept – that which is not in itself contradictory – and thepossibility of the thing of which the concept is a concept, a real possi-bility. The proof of the latter is the actual presence or presentation ofthe object corresponding to the concept.1 Yet possibility here meansmerely the ‘contingency’ of something that may or may not ‘come topass’ [SZ 143], and, in fact, is tantamount to actuality. The second pointto note is that possibility is, in quite different senses, at once a categoryand an existential in fundamental ontology. The being ready-to-hand ofan item of equipment is a being-possible for something, but this occursonly by virtue of Dasein’s understanding of the world as a horizon of

78


finality. This understanding is a ‘projection (Entwurf )’ [SZ 145] of thepossibilities of items of equipment. Given that such a projection rests ulti-mately on the ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ peculiar to Dasein, however, it isDasein itself that is always thrown beyond itself in projecting possibilities forthe sake of its own being. Dasein is a ‘being ahead-of-itself (Sich-vorweg-sein)’[SZ 192]; it is always on the way to achieving a possibility of its own being.Such a being-underway is not to be merely ‘tacked on’ to a traditional orindeterminate conception of being, but it rather determines the veryExistenz of Dasein itself. Hence when Heidegger writes that Dasein’sessence [Wesen] lies in its Existenz, the former term is as little to be under-stood as a what-being which may or may not be actual as the latter termis to be understood as denominating the that-it-is of something, the factthat something is. The Wesen of Dasein is to be understood in a verbalsense as, precisely, a being underway, a being-possible.

It is by thinking the Existenz of Dasein in this way that, according tothe Basic Problems of Phenomenology, the analytic of Dasein aims tocounteract the ‘naivety’ [G24 155/110] of Greek ontology. Even beforethe advent of the Christian doctrine according to which each and everybeing is created, Greek ontology would be naive insofar as it interpretshuman being in terms of the being of the things of the world, insofar asousia is thought to determine beings as such, the human being included.This is a problematic that is essential to the project of Heidegger’sdestruction in 1927. In addition to recovering the original sense of thethree different moments of the ancient conception of being, namelybeing-produced, being as presence and being as truth, Heidegger seeksto delimit a form of naivety or inauthenticity that has infected philoso-phy from its inception. As we read in §6 of Being and Time:

Greek ontology and its history […] prove that when Dasein under-stands either itself or being in general, it does so in terms of the‘world’ [SZ 21–2].

Greek ontology would have to be delimited, to be shown to have onlya restricted sphere of validity, for it does not ‘get beyond a commonconception of Dasein and its comportments’ [G24 156/111], and theExistenz proper to the being that we are has ‘been forgotten in naiveancient ontology’. This forgetting at the inception of philosophy woulddetermine the entirety of its history.2 Even Kant’s demonstration of theimpossibility or paralogism of any application of the categories determi-native of objects to the transcendental ego does not lead to a positiveaccount of the Existenz of Dasein.3

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Greek ontology, then, would be determined by the inauthenticity orfallenness that Being and Time shows to be the everyday fate of thehuman being. To a certain degree the charge seems irrefutable in rela-tion to Aristotle. One glance at the treatise On the Soul is sufficient torecognise that the basic ontological concepts such as ousia, form andmatter, which all originally derive from an interpretation of inner-worldly beings, are carried over to an interpretation of human beingitself. The question here, however, is precisely one of degree. The pre-ceding chapter referred to Aristotle’s statement that ‘the soul is allthings’, and this would seem to distinguish quite radically, perhaps evenontologically, the soul and the beings that it is not. For Aristotle, thesoul is not a being in one region of the world about which we wouldhave to wonder how it could go outside of itself to encounter the thingsthat it is not. Perhaps no description other than naive seems to qualifybetter Aristotle’s determination of the soul as the form or eidos of thebody, but this naivety is not that of a naive realism and a positive inter-pretative appropriation of it is not impossible. Certainly, one can say, asHeidegger does concerning Husserl in 1925, that ‘if there were an entitywhose ‘what’ is precisely to be and nothing but to be, then this ideativeregard of such an entity would be the most fundamental of misunder-standings’ [G20 152/110]. The eidetic determination of the soul almostinevitably achieves a reification of the soul itself, one that obscures bothDasein’s being-in-the-world and its being-ahead-of-itself as a being-possible. Yet, significantly, the soul and the body as form and matter, arenot two things or substances, two separable beings, as they will be inDescartes. Hence in a register that contrasts sharply with that of 1927,Heidegger can even write in 1926 that Aristotle’s doctrine of ψυχx, as an‘ontology of life’, brought ‘the problem of the soul onto genuine groundsfor the first time’ [G22 184].

These brief remarks serve to illustrate that Heidegger’s argument in1927 is not to be taken at face value and that it cannot be adequatelyunderstood without reference to the earlier interpretations of the 1920s.Aristotle’s account of the soul in De Anima admits both a ‘positive’ and‘negative’ repetition; one can stress both its limits and its originality. Theprimary aim of this chapter, however, is to examine the most fundamen-tal aspect of Heidegger’s positive appropriation of Aristotle’s thinkingwithin the analytic of Dasein. This concerns the very determination ofDasein as a being-possible and being-under-way, for the earlier texts of the1920s show that Heidegger develops an account of the movedness(Bewegtheit) of Dasein by appropriating Aristotle’s determination of move-ment (Bewegung) and the thinking of possibility that is involved in it.



This appropriation is by no means explicit in Being and Time and, as hasbeen remarked, there is no thematic discussion of movement in the textitself. Section 48 does, however, offer an indication of the importance andcentrality of a thinking of movement, movement understood in thewidest sense, within the analytic of Dasein. The section seeks to clarify thebeing of Dasein as a being-ahead-of-itself in comparing it to beings ‘towhose kind of being becoming belongs’, such as fruit in the process ofripening:

When we speak of the ‘not-yet’ of the unripeness, we do not have inview something else that stands outside and which – with utter indif-ference to the fruit – might be present-at-hand in it and with it. Whatwe have in view is the fruit itself in its specific kind of being. […] Theripening fruit not only is not indifferent to its unripeness as some-thing other than itself, but it is that unripeness as it ripens. The ‘not-yet’ has already been included in the very being of the fruit, not assome random characteristic but as something constitutive [SZ 243].

The not-yet-being-ripe of the fruit would not be something in or with theactual piece of fruit, nor would it simply be a future state of the fruit, towhich the fruit at present would be indifferent, and that is to say, unaf-fected in its being. The not-yet-being ripe of the fruit rather determinesthe very being of the fruit itself insofar as it is ripening. Now accordingto Being and Time this ‘ripening’ of the fruit is ‘formally analogous’[SZ 244] to the being of Dasein, whose being ahead of itself as its ownnot-yet is to be interpreted positively as constitutive of its own being asa being-possible. For all that fundamental ontology seeks to distinguishthe being of Dasein from that of innerworldly beings it is not, then, andperhaps surprisingly, averse to establishing an analogy between the formerand a particular sort of the latter, namely natural beings.

In the first section of the present chapter the aim is to show, in fact,how this analogy is but the exterior manifestation of a more extensiveappropriation of Aristotle’s account of movement, and, in particular, ofphusis or nature as movement. First, following Heidegger to a certainextent, and with particular reference to the analyses of Pierre Aubenquein his Le problème de l’être chez Aristote, I aim to show that the Physicsoffers a thinking of, to use a term that will be clarified, an ‘ecstatic’movement. Subsequently, I will show how Heidegger appropriates suchan account of movement in thinking the movedness of Dasein accord-ing to the most profound structure of its Existenz, namely its ecstatictemporality.

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Considering Heidegger’s conception of temporality leads in the sec-ond section of the chapter, however, to an examination of Aristotle’sown account of time in Physics IV. This account is read with regard to thedelimitation of it as a ‘vulgar’ conception of time that Heideggerannounces in §6 of Being and Time and articulates extensively in TheBasic Problems of Phenomenology. As I indicated in the introduction tothis study, this delimitation of Aristotle’s conception of time as derivingfrom an ‘understanding’ of being as constant-presence seems to inflectnegatively the entirety of Heidegger’s interpretation of the Stagirite in1927. Yet I will be led to ask whether Aristotle does not in fact think timeaccording to his own determination of ecstatic movement, and that is tosay, whether he does not at least offer the possibility of a thinking oftime other than as a mere succession of ‘nows’.

3.1 Ecstatic movement

α – The three principles of becoming in Physics I

Wherever something is asked concerning the essence of move-ment, being must be brought to language. Thematically or not,being must here be uttered [G31 58].

In the Physics Aristotle addresses the question of movement according totwo distinct, but overlapping, analyses: in the first book of the textaccording to three principles of becoming, and in the third book accord-ing to the concepts of dunamis and energeia, ‘actuality’ and ‘possibility’.Sandwiched between these books we find an account of phusis or nature,and in what follows I treat all of these analyses in the order that theyarise in Aristotle’s text.

The seventh chapter of the first book of the Physics delineates the plu-rality of principles presupposed by the fact of becoming – τ� γ�γν,σθαι –as follows:

anything that ‘becomes’ is always complex: there is what begins toexist and something that comes to be this; and the latter may beregarded under two aspects – as what persists (τ� cποκ,ιμNνων) or asthe contrasted qualification (τ� iντικ,ιμNνων) [190b11–17].

If a man becomes cultured, what he has become, namely cultured, canbe opposed both to the man and to his previously being uncultured. Inbecoming cultured the man remains as that which has become cultured,whereas his being uncultured, the ‘contrasted qualification’, does not.



In this way, Aristotle delineates three principles constitutive of becoming,principles that are of ‘universal application’ [190a14], applying to everymovement or change (μ,ταβολx)4 as such. The first is what comes intobeing, the new aspect in the becoming or change. This Aristotle termsform (eidos). The term is here to be understood in a broad sense as denom-inating anything that can be predicated of a thing, such as Socrates’being cultured, his pallor or any other attribute.5 It is only in the subse-quent discussion of what is termed pure genesis, the coming into beingof something as such, and not merely the coming into being of an acci-dental quality of a thing, that form is to be understood in the narrow andproper sense as denominating the essence or what-being of a being.

Second, form is opposed to that from which the form has become, thatwhich itself does not persist in the change; becoming cultured can onlycome from being uncultured, pallor from a state that is not pallor,namely a healthy skin tone. Form, in short, can only come from the con-trary of this form. Such a contrary Aristotle thinks according to the idea,whose significance cannot be overstated, of the στNρησι�, the privationor shortage of the form that comes into existence; being uncultured is alack of culture, coldness is a lack of warmth. For Aristotle, shortage is an, ∂δο� π%�,6 a sort of appearance. This would mean that when we saythat someone is uncultured, this being uncultured is given as an absenceof culture in the person herself; culture appears in a certain sense as pre-cisely what is absent in the person’s being uncultured. With this thinkingof shortage Aristotle aims to make the fact of movement comprehensiblein transcending the impasses or aporiai that had led to the denial of itsreality in earlier Greek thinking. Parmenides, for one, would have heldthat being, to on, is unchanging and thus that movement is a mere illu-sion. One of the intellectual impasses supporting this view can be statedas follows: what arises from a process of change can come neither fromsomething that is nor from something that is not. Both are equallyimpossible since what results from the change cannot come from some-thing if this thing already existed, just as much as it cannot come fromnothing, for there is nothing for it to come out of. Yet, on Aristotle’saccount, what becomes comes neither from simply something, nor fromsimply nothing, but rather from the positive absence of the form, a lackthat resides in the being that persists through the change:

It is obvious that, from the premises ‘being has only one meaning’and ‘contradictories cannot co-exist’, it is not a true inference thatthere is nothing which ‘is not’; for ‘what is not’ may very well notexist absolutely but be ‘what is not this or that’ [187a3–7].

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One can hold it to be impossible that something should come fromwhat is not, a μy �ν, only in failing to recognise the relative non-being,rather than absolute non-being, that is shortage. If shortage is thatwhich ‘in itself is not (καθ’ αcτ� μy �ν)’ [191b15], it is not simply noth-ing, since it is always the lack of a definite form. It is, as Heideggerextrapolates in 1924, a ‘not-being in the sense of a definite being-there(Da), a being-there of absence’ [G18 298].

The third principle of becoming is what can be opposed both to formand the shortage of this form, namely what persists through the change,to hupokeimenon. The first chapter of the present study examined thisquestion. Yet if there are three principles of becoming in general, namelyshortage, form and hupokeimenon, what is the ground of this threefold?What do these principles divide? The idea of divisibility is key here,since as Aristotle underlines in book six of the Physics ‘everything thatmoves has to be divisible (δικιρ,τ�ν)’ [234b10]. Yet the three principlesof becoming cannot be understood to divide the being in movement inany ordinary, and that is to say, ontic sense. Certainly, in the precedingchapters of the first book of the Physics Aristotle discusses in relation tohis predecessors the enquiry into the principles of becoming as a questionof the elements of beings. The principles, however, cannot themselves beunderstood in this way since shortage, first of all, is a sort of non-being.Shortage is a conception of beings in their being, and it thus cannot bean element in the sense of a real part of the being in which it wouldinhere. Second, and as I showed in the first chapter of this study, ifmatter and form or the ‘subject’ and its accidents are that of which abeing is ‘composed’, then they are no more simply parts or elements ofa being, given that it is physically impossible to apprehend the onewithout, and thus apart from, the other.

The three principles, then, do not constitute a mere ontic division, adivision that would occur at the level of beings. They constitute insteadan ontological ‘division’; the three principles of movement are the prin-ciples of the being-moved of a being. Yet the question remains: how arewe to think the three principles as principles of the being-moved of abeing? In order to think this, it is necessary to recognise that at themoment of a being’s movement, its form is what it will be. The form ofa being is what it is not yet; it is what it is on the way to becoming. Thisform, however, can only come from the positive lack of the form thatwas resident in the subject. This lack or shortage is what a being is nolonger; it is what it is on the way to no longer being. This is to say thatthe being that is in movement, is both the not-yet of its form and theno-longer of the shortage of this form. In other words, the being that is



in movement is stretched out, as it were, as or in the direction of itsnot-yet and no-longer. The not-yet and the no-longer cannot be under-stood to represent states which are merely absent from a present being,which itself would at each moment of its movement be indifferent tothese states, but they rather constitute the being of a being in movement.This is to say that the not-yet and no-longer cannot be understood, how-ever difficult it may be not to think in this way, as chronologically priorand posterior to the present state of the being in movement. In itsmovement, a being is at one and the same time shortage, form and apresent ‘subject’ or hupokeimenon.

It is such a threefold ontological structure of becoming that is to bethought as ecstatic, a standing outside of itself, a non-coincidence withitself of the being in movement. As we read in Physics IV, ‘every changeis by nature ecstatic (Rκστατικ�ν)’ [222b21]. Aristotle otherwiseexpresses this idea by saying that every change is the being outside of itselfof a being: ‘movement makes the being exist outside of itself (κ�νησι�Rξ�στησι τ� cπbρχον)’ [221b3]. It is to be remarked here that the verbRξ�στησι or Rξιστbναι that I have translated as being-outside-of-itself isthe origin of the Latin existentia, and in 1927 Heidegger notes the essen-tial affiliation of the verb with the idea of ecstasis that he uses to describeDasein’s temporality.7 In the Introduction to Metaphysics of 1935, however,Heidegger dissociates the two terms, introducing a much more negativeargument concerning the verb: ‘the thoughtlessness and vapidity withwhich one uses the words “existence” and “to exist” as designations forbeing offer fresh evidence of our alienation from being’ since the origi-nal Greek verb would mean, in fact, to be destroyed and thus ‘preciselynot to be’ [EM 49]. A word that we use to speak of the being of a thingwould originally mean the destruction and thus non-being of a thing.Yet this etymology is by no means certain. As Pierre Aubenque retorts inciting the dictionary of Liddell and Scott, the Greek verb never pos-sessed such a negative sense, even if, for Aristotle, ecstatic movementhas the secondary effect of wearing out, aging and finally destroyingbeings.8 To follow Aubenque, the idea that the being in movementexists outside of itself means that ‘in every one of its moments, it“bursts open,” as it were, overtakes itself and re-overtakes itself accord-ing to a plurality of senses and directions that define the ecstatic unityof its structure’.9

In order to conceive this ecstatic structure we are compelled to thinkthe being in movement as stretched out beyond itself as merely a pres-ent thing and thus beyond the present moment in time. Certainly, thistemporal sense of the three principles is by no means thematic in the

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first book of the Physics. This is evident when Aristotle discusses formand shortage together as either the presence or the absence, the parousiaor the apousia, of form [191a7]. Form and shortage are presented simplyas a question of presence or absence, whereas, as we have seen, at themoment of the change form is not simply present but it is what a beingis not yet, and shortage is what a being is no longer. Yet, in the end, thetemporal sense of Aristotle’s analysis can only be determined in readingPhysics IV. The more immediate task of the present chapter, however, isone of examining the account of phusis in the second book of thePhysics in relation to what is announced in the first book as anotherway of overcoming the Eleatic impasses concerning movement: athinking of movement according to the conceptual doublet of dunamisand energeia.

β – Phusis and the definition of movement according to dunamis and energeia

According to the first chapter of Physics II, physis constitutes a particularsort or region of beings, the phusei onta, natural beings. As examples ofsuch beings Aristotle offers animals and their organs, plants and the fourelements: earth, fire, air and water. This region of beings is delimited incontrast to the beings that are produced technically. The natural beinghas the iρχx κινxσ,ω� [192b14], the principle of its movement initself, whereas the being produced technically has this principle inanother being, in the producer; a human being is generated from ahuman being whereas a bedstead is not generated from a bedstead[193b8–9]. Human beings, here considered biologically, produceanother human being through the process of reproduction, whereas thetechnical product can never reproduce itself in this way even if it ‘inci-dentally has within itself the principles of change’ [192b22–3] whichinhere in its materials. A wooden bedstead could bring forth a tree if itwere allowed to germinate, but never another bedstead.

For Aristotle, ‘everything that possesses this kind of principle’, namelythe principle of its movement in itself, ‘ “has” phusis’ [192b33–4]. Phusisis, thus, the principle of the movement of the phusei onta. To followHeidegger’s translation in 1939 of arche in this context, phusis is the ‘ori-gin and ordering’ [G9 247/189] of the movement of natural beings; ori-gin and ordering because phusis is not, so to speak, left behind by that ofwhich it is the origin, but it rather always remains with what emergesfrom it. Phusis thus constitutes the being of natural beings; the questionof what phusis is, is one of the beingness of natural beings – J οSσ�α τaνφjσ,ι �ντων [193a10].



Aristotle enumerates different modalities of movement in delimitingthe sphere of the phusei onta. These modalities are, in effect, presup-posed by the analysis of becoming in Physics I, and they correspond todifferent categories of being: locomotion (φορb) is movement accordingto the category of place (κατ� τ�πον); growth and diminution (αvξησι�and φθ�σι�), the increase and decrease in the size of something, is move-ment according to the category of quantity (κατ� π�σον) and alteration(iλλο�ωσι�) is movement according to the category of quality (κατ�πο�ον). These three modes of κ�νησι� are, however, to be distinguishedfrom pure genesis and its counterpart, φθ��ι�, corruption, which ismovement according to the first of the categories, namely beingness.This is the most fundamental modality of movement in relation to thequestion of phusis since a determination of the essence of the latter isachieved within a comparison of natural to technical production.Notwithstanding the fact that Aristotle here and elsewhere uses the termsκ�νησι� and μ,ταβολx interchangeably, as signifying a change awayfrom something to something (Oκ τινο� ,$� τι), metabole is the most gen-eral concept of ‘movement’. In other words, metabole has two species,namely genesis/corruption and kinesis, which itself has three modes.10

Upon delimiting the region of natural beings, Aristotle first addresses acontemporary conception of the essence of phusis as matter. The form ofnatural beings can change as when one recasts a bronze statue, but thematerial persists; the form thus can be thought as merely accidental andtemporary, whereas the essential element would be its matter. Certainly,the bronze can be further reduced to its elements, but this is why ‘differ-ent people say that either fire, or earth, or air, or water, or some of these,or all of these are phusis itself’ [193a24]. Against such a determination ofthe essence of phusis as consisting in the ultimately ‘underlying material’,Aristotle posits the primacy of form. Just as unformed wood is not yet atable, a product of techne, the matter that is, for Aristotle, only potentiallyflesh and bone does not yet have the phusis [193b3–4] that pertains toflesh and bone itself; ‘when we speak of the thing into the nature we areinquiring, we mean by its name an actuality (entelechia) not merely apotentiality’ [7–8]. Beings are, in the proper or highest sense, only whenthey hold-themselves-in-their-end, only when they come to stand as the sortof beings that they are in their form. Hence,

nature is the distinctive form or quality of such things as have withinthemselves the origin and ordering of movement, such form or char-acteristic property not being separable from the things themselves,save conceptually [193b3–5].

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In technical production the form that the produced being will assume isfirst envisaged in the soul before the matter itself is set in motion in themovement of production. Natural production, however, without therebeing such a pre-envisaging of the form, is a self-production, a self-placinginto form, which is more proper to the essence of phusis than the matterthat form as a self-placing appropriates.

Phusis, then, is the movement of a self-placing into form, but it is nec-essary to determine what movement itself is, for as Aristotle writes inPhysics III [200b14], without understanding this we have not yet arrivedat an adequate determination of phusis. Here Aristotle offers an account,a definition even, of movement in terms of dunamis and energeia or ent-elechia, but these concepts are more presupposed than explained in thePhysics, and they are examined in the most extensive fashion in theMetaphysics. All three terms, in fact, already derive from an interpreta-tion of the being of the being in movement. Concerning dunamis as,according to book Delta, a ‘principle of movement or change’ [1019a19],the production of a table, for example, requires that the wood have thecapacity or potentiality to support the form of a table. It requires alsothe capacity of a producer, an agent, to shape this wood into a table, acapacity that is realised in the finished product. In both these active andpassive senses dunamis is a determination of the being of beings and, likeshortage, it is to be thought as a certain sort of non-being, the presenceof an absence.

Dunamis, however, is relative to energeia, to the actuality for which itconstitutes the possibility. Now the technical origin of energeia is evidentgiven the Greek word from which it derives, namely ergon, which meansa work or task, but in the movement of pure genesis, if matter is the pos-sible then the energeia of a being is its being-in-work, its standing pres-ent in its form. Energeia thus is form, but form viewed from a certainperspective, as Aristotle writes in Metaphysics Eta, 3:

We must not fail to recognise that sometimes it is doubtful whether aname denotes the composite beingness or the energeia and the mor-phe, whether, for example, house denotes the composite thing madeof bricks and stones arranged in such-and-such a way or the energeiaand the eidos, a shelter [1043a29–33].

‘House’ can denominate either bricks and mortar arranged in a certainway or a shelter, and the latter is the veritable being-in-work, that is, thefunction of the being of a house. According to this sense of energeiaHeidegger’s attempt to interpret it with the idea of Zuhandenheit shows



itself to be by no means arbitrary. The tradition has, however, translatedboth energeia and entelechia with one term, namely actus, act or actuality,and they are indeed synonymous insofar as they denote not the processof movement itself, but rather the state of a being at the accomplishmentand completion of this process; a house can only be a shelter at the endof the process of its being built. This endpoint of movement is rest, butrest is an aspect and a shortage of movement rather than the absolutenegation of it, and Aristotle clearly distinguishes rest from immobility,the former characterising only those beings that can move.11

Although dunamis and energeia issue from an interpretation of move-ment, Metaphysics Z does go on to develop a thinking of these terms thatis contrasted to movement.

For every movement is incomplete – making thin, learning, walking,building: these are movements, and indeed incomplete. For it is nottrue that at the same time a thing is walking and has walked […] Butit is the same thing that at the same time has seen and is seeing, oris thinking and has thought. The latter is what I mean by energeiaand the former what I mean by movement [1048b28–35].

Seeing, thought and even life itself are neither the result of a process nora process that seeks an end outside of itself in the way that the move-ment of building aims towards the finished house. Such activities fallunder the title of praxis [1048b20] as opposed to poiesis, for they havetheir end and perfection in themselves; the present of these activities isalready perfect, and thus it can be said that it is the same thing to see andto have seen. It should be remarked that in such activities energeia doesnot come to replace dunamis, but it is rather the pure manifestation ofits possibility that safeguards and even develops the latter. As Aristotlewrites in On the Soul, energeia in this sense is not the destruction (φθορb)of dunamis in its becoming actual but rather its preservation(σωτηρ�α)12; the act of playing a musical instrument, for example, is notthe destruction of the musician’s capacity to play, but it is rather the fullmanifestation and often the improving of this capacity itself.

There can, however, be no definition of either sense, the one relatingto movement and the one contrasted to it, of energeia:

The notion of energeia that we propose can be known by induction(Rπαγωγx) from the particular cases; we need not seek a definitionfor every term, but must comprehend the analogy. That as that whichis actually building to that which is capable of building, so is that

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which is awake to that which is asleep; and that which is seeing tothat which has the eyes shut, but has the power of sight; and thatwhich is differentiated out of matter to the matter; and the finishedarticle to the raw material [1048a38–9].

Energeia, then, cannot be defined and can only be known by induction.It cannot be defined because it is a determination, not simply of beings,as Heidegger is keen to stress, but of the very being of beings. As we sawin the first chapter, for Aristotle the being of beings transcends all possi-bility of definition; it can neither be defined nor serve to define anythingelse. This means, however, that it is necessary to understand the idea ofinduction here in a quite particular sense. In fact, if we were to under-stand ‘induction’ here as the empirical working through of several factualinstances in order to attain something general and abstract from theproperties in which they share, then the translation of epagoge by ‘induc-tion’ is misleading. Epagoge, as Heidegger writes in 1939, means rather:

‘leading-toward’ what comes into view insofar as we have previouslylooked away, over and beyond individual beings. At what? At being.For example, only if we already have treeness in view can we identifyindividual trees. ’Επαγωγx is seeing and making visible whatalready stands in view – for example, treeness [G9 244/187].

Selecting particular examples of energeia in order to attain a general,conceptual determination of energeia itself, would only presuppose whatit attempts to explain insofar as we would already have to have anunderstanding of energeia in order to select examples of it. Aristotle’s‘induction’, therefore, in this instance at least, is to be understood asthe interpretation and making explicit of what we have always andalready understood of beings in their being, and in this case in theirbeing-in-work. The induction necessary to an account of energeia, how-ever, and as Aristotle relates, has an analogical form. ‘Actuality’ can onlybe known fully in relation to ‘possibility’, the possibility to become thatparticular ‘actuality’, and thus the relation between the ‘actual’ and the‘possible’ can only be thought in the manner of, and in fact as whatunderlies or enables, the relation between the finished product and theraw-material, for example, or of that between the person seeing and theperson sleeping.

On Heidegger’s account, with such a thinking of ‘actuality’ and ‘possi-bility’ as an interpretative, ontological response to the fact of movement,Aristotle’s Metaphysics attains another level of philosophical enquiry, one



in which there occurs a genuine breakthrough to the being of beings.Although the question of the ontological difference still resonates in theideas of to hupokeimenon, ‘the subject’, and ousia that are promoted inbook Zeta, in book Theta the question of the being of beings is never-theless brought much more explicitly to the fore. To return, however, tothe ‘definition’ of movement in Physics III, if both the concepts of energeiaand dunamis derive from an interpretation of the fact of movement, thenwhat sense could there be in attempting to define movement itself withthese very concepts? The enterprise would be circular from the outset,with movement defined by ‘actuality’ and ‘possibility’, and ‘actuality’and ‘possibility’ explained in terms of movement. Yet, this would onlybe a vicious circle if we expected from this ‘definition’ a veritable defini-tion rather than an account of movement – rather than, in other words,an attempt to make the fact of movement intelligible in the widestsense. The point to be drawn from this difficulty is that movementresists definition as much as the ontological ideas used to account for it,because movement, like dunamis and energeia themselves, is of the orderof the being of beings.

According to Aristotle’s infamous ‘definition’, however, in all itsmodalities ‘the actuality (entelechia) of what is possible as possible isclearly movement’ [201b4–5]. Now for the proponents of what has beencalled the ‘process view’, entelechia is here to be translated as actualising,and thus movement would be defined as the actualising, that is, theprocess of the becoming actual of a potentiality.13 This interpretation isproblematic on several counts: nowhere else in the Aristotelian corpuscan entelechia be understood to signify a process rather than a result of aprocess, and the definition would risk becoming still more circular, ifnot vacuous, since movement would be defined as a transition orprocess, that is, as a movement. Certainly, it cannot be denied thatAristotle describes movement elsewhere as the becoming actual of a pos-sibility. The third chapter of Physics III offers the following remarks:

movement does appear as a certain energeia, but as not yet havingcome into its end; the reason for this is that the possible of whichthere is actuality (energeia) is incomplete. Hence the difficulty ofgrasping what it is. For what can it be save a shortage, or a possibilityor a pure actuality? But none of these seem possible. It remains then,as we have said, to define it as a certain actuality [201b31–202a1].

Movement is a certain actuality, a certain energeia, but one that is ateles,incomplete, not yet at its end. It is incomplete, because the possible has

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not yet been fully actualised, which is to say that the possible has not yetbeen destroyed in becoming actual.

An account of movement as the becoming actual of possibility, then,is not foreign to Aristotle’s thinking. Yet such an account tells us lessabout movement than it does about its beginning and its end, and, inthe words of Aubenque, it ‘would be to use the notions of actuality andpossibility in an extrinsic way in relation to movement as if possibilityand actuality were the terms between which movement moves and notdeterminations of movement itself’.14 The most fundamental problemof such an account, however, is that one cannot simply assert the chrono-logical priority of possibility to actuality. Certainly, on the one hand,wood is capable of, appropriate for being formed into a table before theprocess of its formation. Yet, on the other hand, possibility is only knownin relation to the actuality of which it is a possibility, and it only becomesmanifest in its actualisation. This is why Aristotle can write inMetaphysics Theta, within a discussion of the different senses of priorityin relation to both terms, that actuality is prior to possibility according toits concept or formula, τu λ�γ/ [1049b13]. If possibility precedes actualityas the condition of the latter, then it is equally true to say that actualityprecedes possibility as the condition of the latter’s revelation.

On this basis, one can understand why Aristotle’s response to thequestion of the respective chronological priority of either possibility oractuality is ambiguous, why he will assert that ‘according to time, actu-ality is in one sense prior, in another sense it is not’ [1049b12]. In fact,and to cite Aubenque once again,

the debate concerning the respective priority of possibility and actu-ality is a false debate. Actuality and possibility are co-originary; theyare only the ecstases of movement; only the clash of possibility andactuality at the heart of movement is real; only the violence ofhuman discourse … can maintain dissociated … the originary ten-sion which constitutes, in its unity that is always divided, the beingof the being in movement.15

The energeia of form is what a being is not-yet in its movement, but thisnot-yet arises only from the possibility – in other words, the shortage –of this form. That dunamis and energeia are the ecstases of movementmeans that they are the mutual implication of a being’s not-yet andno-more insofar as it is in motion. Dunamis and energeia as determinationsof the being of the being in movement, then, are another way ofexpressing the threefold, but not tripartite, structure that Aristotle first



approaches in the Physics according to three principles of shortage, formand hupokeimenon.

It is, for us, from this perspective that Aristotle’s ‘definition’ of move-ment must be thought. Possibility and actuality are here distinguished,and without such a distinction any discourse concerning movementwould be impossible. Yet, they are at once spoken of in their indistinc-tion and mutual implication. Movement is the actuality of the possibleas such, it is that by which the possible shows itself in its own particularactuality as the possible in relation to the higher actuality of which it isthe possibility. The ‘actuality-view’ of Aristotle’s definition is, thus, rightto understand in the word entelechia an actuality rather than an actual-ising, and to understand movement as in some sense a specific actualityof the possible. Yet this view remains abstract without an apprehensionof the very ecstatic structure of movement.

Although Heidegger does not explicitly bring to the fore the ecstaticstructure implied in Aristotle’s determination of movement in general,the essay of 1939 entitled ‘On the Essence and Concept of Phusis’ bringsthe particular ecstatic structure of phusis as movement to the fore. Thefirst point to note concerning this structure is that the particularity ofphusis as movement lies not only in that it is self-moving, but also inthat natural production, unlike technical production, does not come toits end in the repose of the finished product, but rather consists in a con-stant process of generation and corruption, as the tree that blossoms andsheds it leaves within the cycle of the seasons. In the final paragraph ofthe first chapter of Physics II, Aristotle characterises the unfinishedmovement or the energeia ateles of phusis, which is a continual move-ment of self-placing into form, as a ‘way’:

phusis which is addressed as genesis is a way into phusis (I φjσι� Jλ,γομNνη 0� γNν,σι� �δ�� Rστιν ,1� φjσιν). […] [W]hatever is abeing from and in the manner of phusis goes from something towardsomething insofar as this being is determined by phusis (iλλ� τ�φυ�μ,νον Rκ τιν�� ,1� τ Oρχ,τα, φj,ται). But ‘toward what’ doesit go forth in the manner of phusis (,1� τ� ο2ν φj,ται;)? Not towardthat ‘from which’ (it is generated in each instance) but rather towardthat as which it is generated in each instance (οSχ Rξ ο2, iλλ’ ,1� 3)[193b12–18].

Heidegger argues that ‘way’ here is not simply to be thought as a distancebetween a starting point and a goal, but rather as a being-on-the-way.The natural being, in other words, is not a mere present-at-hand

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thing which would exist indifferently between the two limits of itsmovement. Certainly, at 192b Aristotle writes that all phusei onta arebeings in the proper sense or have being; that the defining characteristicof being itself is to be a hupokeimenon; and that phusis is always in such ahupokeimenon. As the first chapter of this thesis showed, however, if tohupokeimenon speaks of something that lies present before us, then itspeaks also of the being of the thing as residing precisely in its lying-present. The fact, therefore, that phusis always resides in a hupokeimenondoes not mean that the movement of phusis would have its seat in a self-identical subject that would be ontologically ‘indifferent’ to its move-ment, but only that at each moment of movement there is somethingthat lies present; and it is the lying-present of a natural being which is tobe understood as a being-underway.

This being-under-way is a being-on-the-way to phusis itself. Thismovement cannot, however, simply be represented in the form of a circle,since phusis does not advance towards that from which it was generated,but rather it advances towards what it will become. Although theprocess of natural generation as a being-on-the-way never has to go out-side of itself, since, for example, man generates man, a father, for exam-ple, does not beget another father but rather a son. On the one hand,then, what is generated is something other than that ‘from which’ it isgenerated; and yet, on the other hand, it is the same since it is still aman. Thus if the movement of phusis cannot be represented in the formof a circle it is nevertheless the case, as Heidegger writes, that the ‘ “fromwhich”, the “to which”, and the “how” ’ of phusis as a placing itself intoappearance ‘remain the same’ [G9 293/224]. This is to say that if phusisas a going forth is a returning into itself, then the ‘self to which itreturns’, rather than being a mere indifferently present-at-hand thing,‘remains a going-forth’.

In the concluding lines of the chapter Aristotle returns briefly to theaccount of shortage in the preceding book of the Physics. Morphe, form,is phusis but both these terms are said διχa�, in two ways, insofar asshortage is a kind of form [193b20–1]. As Heidegger extrapolates, thebeing-under-way of phusis as a coming into appearance of form is atonce constituted by an absence; in this being-under-way an absence‘simultaneously becomes present’ [G9 367]. Yet Heidegger thinks thisabsence in two ways: not only as a no-longer but also as a not-yet. This isto say that Heidegger draws out the implications of the three principlesof becoming in Physics I rather than following Aristotle’s analysis to theletter. Form is not simply to be opposed to shortage since it is, as what a



being is not yet, in itself a sort of absence. Thus, to return to the exampleof the ripening fruit, on the one hand the fruit in fruition is not yet theripe fruit that it will be; but the not-yet of the ripeness of the fruit canemerge only from the lack or shortage of what it will be.

The ‘not yet’ and the ‘no longer’ as, in their unity, a sort of absenceconstitutive of the present being in movement, then, constitute the verybeing of the natural being as a being-under-way, and it is on this basisthat Heidegger offers what one can read as a definition of phusis inAristotle. Phusis is ‘the presencing of the absencing of itself, one that ison-the-way from itself and unto itself. As such an absencing, φjσι�remains a going-back-into-itself, but this going-back is only the goingback of a going-forth’ [G9 299/228]. The natural being, insofar as it is inmovement, is its own not-yet and no-more16 and, again, if this ecstaticmovement as phusis is the returning back of phusis into itself, then thisgoing back is a going-back to a being that is only ever a going-forth.

γ – The ecstatic temporality of Dasein

Such is the interpretation of phusis that Heidegger offers in the mostdeliberate fashion in 1939. Yet how exactly does the analytic of Daseinappropriate Aristotle’s accounts of movement and of phusis of move-ment? In the project of a phenomenological interpretation of Aristotlethat Heidegger articulates in the essay of 1922, a thinking of the moved-ness of ‘factical life’ is explicitly, despite the opacity of some of theterms, related to the concept of shortage:

As ‘not yet such and such’, and in fact as the That-with-respect-to-which (Worauf) of concern, it [factical life] is at the same time alreadysuch and such …. The ‘not-yet’ and the ‘already’ are to be understoodin theirqq ‘unity’, that is they are to be understood on the basis of aprimordial givenness, a givenness for which the ‘not-yet’ and ‘already’are determinate explicata. Determinate, because with them, the objec-tive (das Gegenständliche) is placed in a determinate aspect of move-ment. The concept of στNρησι� is the category of the above namedexplicata [PIA 42/383].

It is necessary to recall at this juncture that throughout the 1920sHeidegger attempts to interpret dunamis and energeia in terms ofZuhandenheit. It would seem that it is for this reason that the weight ofa thinking of the movedness of ‘factical life’, that is, of Dasein, falls onthe idea of shortage. Yet just as in the essay of 1939, shortage is here

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interpreted as the unity of the ‘not-yet’ and ‘already’ of the being inmovement – a unity which is ecstatic in the sense outlined above.

In order to understand fully this interpretative appropriation, how-ever, it is necessary to underline that the first division of Being andTime shows that Dasein’s being has, in fact, a threefold structure. First,as we have seen, Dasein exists as a being that is ahead-of-itself as abeing-possible. Yet, second, the possibilities that Dasein projects do notcome to it, as it were, out of thin air. Dasein has ‘in each case alreadybeen thrown’ or delivered over ‘into a world’ [SZ 192]; it always andalready finds itself with a past and an understanding of itself, of whichit is not the master and which determines the range of what is possiblefor it. Dasein, then, is not merely a potentiality-for-being, but it is athrown-potentiality-for-being. Third, however, Dasein always exists insitu as a being-alongside the entities that it is not. Dasein, then, is an‘ahead-of-itself-already-being-in (a world) as being-alongside (entitiesencountered within-the-world)’ [SZ 327] and Heidegger names theunity of this threefold structure care (Sorge).

The second division of Being and Time, particularly §65, elaborates thespecifically temporal sense of this threefold structure of care. Primarily,Dasein’s being-ahead-of-itself is a being-futural. Dasein is that beingwhich has its being to be, and it comes to itself or towards itself from thepossibilities that it projects as possibilities of its own potentiality-for-being. Dasein exists as its future, which future is more original than andother to a now ‘which has not yet become actual and which sometimewill be for the first time’ [SZ 325]. It is only in existing as ahead-of-itself,as its future that Dasein can expect or await any innerworldly event asthat which is simply not yet present.

Second, Dasein’s being-thrown is an existing as its past (Gewesenheit),existing as a having-been. Such a having-been is to be contrasted to thebeing no-longer present of something vorhanden; ‘ “As long as” Daseinfactically exists, it is never past, but always is indeed as already havingbeen, in the sense of “I-am-as-having-been” ’ [SZ 328]. Dasein has itsthrownness or having-been to be, and it is only on the basis of thishaving-been that it can recall or forget an innerworldly event that isno-longer present. In projecting possibilities as a being-futural Daseinprojects its own having-been, and if it comes towards itself as a being-futural, then in so doing it always comes back to itself from the past.Hence rather than being an ineluctable necessity, Dasein’s past is thesource of its possibilities as a being-futural.

Third, as a being-with or being-towards the things of the world, Daseinexists as a presenting (Gegenwärtigen), a making-present of the beings with



which it is concerned. It is only upon the horizon of its own temporalitythat the beings that Dasein is not can appear as either zuhanden orvorhanden.

In existing as the unity of what Heidegger terms, in an Aristotelianmode, the ecstases of the future, present and past, Dasein is to be thoughtas a being that exists outside of itself:

The future, the character of having been, and the present, show thephenomenal characteristics of the ‘towards-oneself’, the ‘back-to’,and the ‘letting-oneself-be-encountered-by’. The phenomena ofthe ‘towards’, the ‘to’ and the ‘alongside’ make temporality manifestas the Rκστατικ�ν pure and simple. Temporality is the primordial‘outside-of-itself’ in and for itself [SZ 328–9].

Temporality as the basic structure of Dasein’s being ‘is not something thatmight first be extant as a thing and thereafter outside itself, so that itwould be leaving itself behind itself; instead, within its own self, intrin-sically, it is nothing but the outside itself pure and simple’. Temporality,thus, is not, if by the verb ‘be’ we mean to be merely and simply present.Rather than saying that temporality is, it is better to say that it ‘tempo-ralises’ (zeitigt sich) itself. Accordingly, Dasein is not first a being thatwould subsist in itself as a substance only to be led out of itself by theoccasional fact of movement, but it is nothing other than the movement,the unfolding, as it were, of its ecstatic temporalisation. To paraphraseHeidegger’s reading of phusis, if Dasein always comes back to itself fromits having been and towards itself from its being-futural, then the self towhich it returns and comes towards is not merely something indifferentto its movement, but rather remains a going-forth in the movement of itstemporalisation.

It can be seen clearly here, then, how Heidegger mobilises the basicstructure of Aristotle’s account of ecstatic movement, and even of phusisas movement, at the level of Dasein’s ecstatic temporality. Of course, ifphusis and Dasein are formally analogous in their self-moving structure,then Dasein is not merely one being in the world amongst others, butthat being for which there is world; it is a self-aware being-in-the-world.It is necessary to recall here that even if the analysis of Dasein appropri-ates Aristotle’s account of movement, then fundamental ontology never-theless seeks to distinguish radically the being of Dasein from the beingof the things that it is not. Dasein’s movedness, then, can in no way beaccounted for according to the concepts of matter and form, nor accord-ing to any of the Aristotelian modalities of movement. In other words,

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‘the movedness of Dasein is not the movement of something present-at-hand’ [SZ 374]. At bottom, the movedness of Dasein is to bedistinguished from the movement of the things of the world, becauseDasein is not simply a being that can occasionally, or even continually,undergo movement in time. Heidegger seeks to show that Dasein is themovement of time itself as temporality. Temporality, as forming thehorizon of world and therefore of ‘any understanding of being whatsoever’[SZ 1], is that ‘ “in which” the present-at-hand is in motion or at rest’[SZ 419].

The movedness of Dasein is ultimately to be conceived ‘in terms of theway Dasein stretches along’ [SZ 374] between its birth and death. Daseinis this stretch, it is the between of its birth and death, but not as some-thing between two points in time. Certainly, one can consider one’s ownbirth and even one’s own death as mere empirical events that occur intime, notwithstanding the fact that no empirical experience can be hadof either the one or the other. Yet more fundamentally, as a being thathas its being to be, Dasein is a being-born and a being-mortal. Dasein isits birth because it always has the fact of its birth to assume as a taskinsofar as it exists as a being-possible; it is its death because as mortal, assoon as it is born it is already faced with the unrealisable, non-experientialpossibility of its own death. Dasein, therefore, does not simply movealong a pre-existent path or way in time, but it is the whole of this pathitself, it is a being-under-way which stretches itself out as its daysadvance. This stretching out is termed the ‘historising’ (das Geschehen)17

of Dasein and it constitutes, as I indicated in the introduction to thisstudy, the prior condition of any thematic study of history.

3.2 Vulgar time and ecstatic temporality

Physics IV doubtless confirms the Heideggerian de-limitation.Without a doubt, Aristotle thinks time on the basis of ousia asparousia, on the basis of the now, the point etc. And yet anentire reading could be organised that would repeat inAristotle’s text both this limitation and its opposite.

Jacques Derrida ‘Ousia and Gramm[ ’18

Thus far the chapter has shown how Heidegger appropriates Aristotle’sconceptions of movement within an account of the movedness, whichis at bottom the temporality, of Dasein. Yet if Aristotle can be understoodto think movement as an ecstatic movement, then does he not in somesense think time accordingly? Is time for Aristotle not, at least in some



manner, an ecstatic time? As I have already stated, according to thesketch of the destruction of the history of ontology provided in §6 ofBeing and Time, the answer to this question seems to be negative. IfAristotle is one of the Greeks of whom Heidegger writes here, then hewould think time on the basis of the present, as a series of now-points,and ultimately as a ‘mere thing amongst things’ [SZ 26] in passing overDasein’s ecstatic temporality. The ground of these two aspects of thevulgar conception of time would lie in a Greek understanding of beingitself as constant presence. However, following the guiding thread ofJacques Derrida’s remarks in ‘Ousia and Gramm[ ’, the intention here isto show that Aristotle’s text does indeed admit both Heidegger’s delim-itation and its opposite, namely a thinking of an ecstatic time. Thissecond possibility has been deliberately advanced by Pierre Aubenque –to whom Derrida does not refer on this point – within a brief butremarkable passage of his Le problème de l’ être chez Aristote. In readingPhysics IV, therefore, the ultimate aim of the following analyses is todevelop Aubenque’s claims in relation to Heidegger’s delimitation.This delimitation is expressed in the most extensive fashion in thelecture course of 1927 entitled the Basic Problems of Phenomenology, andin reading this I will show that it contains significant nuances thatleave it much more open-ended than §6 of Being and Time itself mightlead us to assume.

The account of time in Physics IV has three main stages, which I exam-ine in the first three following subsections. It begins ‘by means of anexoteric discourse (δι� τaν Rξωτ,ρικaν λ�γων)’ [217b31] that bringsto light the problems, the aporiai that result and have resulted fromphilosophical reflection concerning time. In his customary manner,Aristotle proceeds by introducing a positive response to the philosophi-cal question only after having examined the conceptions of his prede-cessors.19 Second, this treatment of the aporiai is succeeded by adetermination of time as the ‘number of movement according to thebefore and after’. Third, Aristotle offers an account of the status of thenow in relation to time, an account that the elaboration of the aporiaiand the determination of time presuppose to varying degrees. It is onthis basis that I aim to show the manner in which Aristotle’s thinkingdoes indeed allow for both a positive and a negative repetition.

α – The exoteric discourse

The exoteric discourse concerns the question of whether time belongs to‘beings or non-beings (τaν �ντων Rστιν s τaν μy �ντων)’ [32], and thequestion of its nature or phusis. In relation to the first question Aristotle

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articulates an aporetic that has three phases: first, time is composed ofthe past and the future, but as that which is no more and that which isnot yet respectively, the past and future do not exist. How, then, cantime exist if it is ‘what is composed of that which does not exist (τ� δ’Rκ μy �ντων συγκ,�μ,νον)’ [218a2–3]?

The second phase begins by reformulating the same argument: if adivisible thing exists, its parts must also exist, but time, although appar-ently divisible into parts, namely the past and the future, has parts thatdo not themselves exist. Time, thus, does not seem to have any exis-tence; it seems in no way to be an existent thing. If, however, these argu-ments would seem to privilege the ‘now’ as the most existent aspect oftime, then the now itself cannot be understood as a part of a whole,given that the past and the future are non-existent. This is one way inwhich we can understand the argument according to which ‘time doesnot seem to be composed of the now’ [218a8–9]. Yet it can be under-stood in a more fundamental way with reference to the account of thecontinuity of time that, as we will see, Aristotle discusses and developsin the course of Physics IV. The now is not a part of time, time is notcomposed of the now, because time is continuous, that is, divisible adinfinitum, and the now itself, in merely dividing the past from thefuture, is indivisible in the sense of being without duration.

The third phase of the aporetic examines the paradoxical status of thenow: it is difficult to determine whether the ‘now’ which divides thepast from the future is perpetually different or perpetually the same. Onthe one hand, that it is different seems inconceivable because it is impos-sible to say when it disappears to allow a new ‘now’ to take its place. Itcannot disappear when it is present, precisely because it is present; butneither can it disappear in another instant, and the reason for this is tobe found, again, in the theory of continuity. Time contains a potentialinfinity of indivisible, durationless ‘nows’, like the line contains apotential infinity of extensionless points. Consequently, no two ‘nows’can be next to each other, as it were, in time since there would be timebetween them, as time is infinitely divisible. The now, therefore, cannotdisappear in another now, since between the first now and the now inwhich it disappears there is a potential infinity of other ‘nows’ in whichit would have had to have remained identical to itself, which is impos-sible. On the other hand, that it is the same seems equally impossiblebecause it would nullify the distinction between the past, present andthe future; ‘the events of 10,000 years ago would co-exist with those oftoday and nothing will be posterior or anterior to anything else’[218a26–9].20



Aristotle begins the exoteric discourse, then, in asking whether time isor is not a being, whether or not it can be understood to share in ousia[218a3]. The first two phases of the aporetic lead us to apprehend the‘now’ as the most real or existent aspect of time. This already seems to bean illustration of the veracity of Heidegger’s thesis concerning the mean-ing of being in Aristotle and the limitations that this imposes on hisdetermination on time: being means presence, to be present as a thing ispresent. Time, thus, can only be thought on the basis of the now, andultimately as a mere thing. As Heidegger argues in The Basic Problems ofPhenomenology:

Seen in this way, what time is, is only the now that is vorhanden ateach now. Aristotle’s aporia with reference to the being of time –which is still the principal difficulty today – derives from the conceptof being as equal to Vorhandensein [G24 386/272].

Time as commonly conceived is ‘the intrinsically free-floating run off’ ofan ‘extant sequence’ of ‘nows’ [G24 385/272]. The vulgarity or com-monality of Aristotle’s exoteric discourse, then, would consist in the factthat it approaches time as if it were a mere thing without consideringthe adequacy of such a discourse itself. In other words, Aristotle asks‘what is time? (τg Rστιν � χρ�νο�)’ [219a3] without enquiring whetheran account of time does not require us to bring into question, first, thepossibility of time having a what-being or essence in the manner of, say,a table, and, second, the very meaning of being itself. It remains to bedecided, however, whether Aristotle’s exoteric discourse does not lead atleast to the possibility of an esoteric, non-vulgar approach to the ques-tion of time. Certainly, in the course of Physics IV Aristotle never explic-itly brings into question the validity of the exoteric approach incounterposing it to any other.21 Yet it is not unreasonable to expect thatthe introduction of the problem of time by means of the exoteric dis-course serves only to deconstruct, as it were, this discourse itself, for asAristotle writes, these introductory considerations lead us to suspectthat time’s existence is ‘faint and obscure’ [217b33] and even that it‘does not at all exist (5λω� οSκ Oστιν)’.

β – Time as the number of movement

The idea that time is no mere thing amongst other things is one thatseems to emerge from the first of Aristotle’s positive arguments inChapter 11 of Book IV of the Physics. This argument concerns the relationof movement to time. On the one hand, time is intrinsically related to

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movement or change since without it, without our recognising themovement of one particular thing, without even the passage ofthoughts in the soul – which, for Aristotle, is a form of movement22 – wewould be unaware of the passage of time. On the other hand, more orless change can occur in the same time, which means that time itselfcannot be identical with change. Time is not movement, then, but it isintrinsically related to movement. It is ‘something of movement (τ� τt�κινxσ,ω�)’ [219a4]. But what sort of a thing is it? In what way is it athing? For Aristotle, the movement of a moving body is only in thatbody itself, whereas time, as soon as we apprehend a moving body, is‘current everywhere and about everything (παρ� πdσιν)’ [218b14–5].This argument will be developed in Chapter 13: beings that have at leastthe possibility of movement are ‘in time’ and are ‘embraced(π,ριNχ,ται)’ by time.23 These terms can, of course, be compared toKant’s determination of time as a form of intuition, and Heidegger doesindeed make this comparison.24 Understood in this way, then, timewould be much less a being than it would be akin to a condition of pos-sibility of beings.

Moreover, to return to the initial articulation of the problematic inChapter 10, the question of time is twofold: Aristotle not only posesthe question of whether time belongs to beings or non-beings but also thequestion of the nature, the phusis of time. This question is not to be under-stood in the originally Platonic sense of the what-being of a being, sincethe aporetic that Aristotle articulates in relation to it concerns the questionof whether time can be identified with the revolution of the heavens.25

The question of the phusis of time is, therefore, a question of what onecan describe as the ideality or the reality of time. Aristotle responds tothe question in greater depth in Chapter 14 of Physics IV in arguing thattime cannot exist without the soul.26 Insofar as time is what is countedor measured in relation to movement, time itself cannot exist without a‘mind’ to measure or quantify it. Time, then, is that which embracesbeings, but it is this ‘embrace’ only in relation to the soul. We are, atleast in principle, not very far from Heidegger’s own determination oftemporality as that which is more subjective than the subject and moreobjective than the object.

The idea of being in time can be understood to lead us beyond theidea of time as a thing amongst things. The account of time as the dura-tion of movement does not, however, afford us any possibility of tran-scending the second aspect of what Heidegger delimits as the vulgarconception of time, namely the primacy of the now.



Aristotle begins in stating that all movement, as movement from some-thing to something, has a ‘magnitude (μNγ,θο�)’ [219a11] or dimensionand that this dimension, is continuous, that is, infinitely divisible.Movement cannot be decomposed into a series of static parts, but thecontinuity of movement depends on or follows from the continuity ofthe dimension that the moving body traverses in locomotion. Althoughlocomotion is the primary example, dimension cannot simply be under-stood in the sense of spatial extension, since it is thought as a determi-nation of metabole, of movement in its broadest sense, as Aristotle willunderline.27 The problem is not treated explicitly, but all movementmust be seen as possessing dimension: the alteration of a thing from itsbeing-red to its being-green, for example, must also be seen as having adimension, a stretch, evidently non-spatial, such that its movementcannot be decomposed into a series of static parts.28

On this basis, Aristotle states that if dimension and movement arecontinuous, then so too must be the time in which it occurs. The con-cepts of before and after (πρ�τ,ρον κα lστ,ρον) are then introduced asdetermining all three levels; although ‘before and after’ have, forAristotle, predominantly a spatial sense, they characterise dimension,movement and time. In any length, we can distinguish a before andafter of spatial position, and in any locomotion we can distinguishbetween the successive places that the body occupies. In distinguishingthe before and after of movement, however, there is already implied adistinguishing of a before and after of time:

When we determine a movement by distinguishing (�ριζ,ιν) itsbefore and after we also recognise a lapse of time; for it is when we areaware of the measuring of motion by a before and after that we saythat time has passed. Our determination consists in grasping thatthey are different, and that there is something else between them. Forwhen we think that the extremes are different from the middle, andthe soul says that the ‘nows’ are two, one before and one after, thenwe say that there is time, and that that is time. For time is distin-guished by the now [219a22–30].

The before and after are here spoken of as point-like, rather than asstretch-like. They are not the past and the future which the now divides,but two successive ‘nows’, one earlier, one later. In the case of locomo-tion the being in movement is now-here and now-there, it was at thestarting point of the movement at a certain point of time, and it reachedthe terminus at another. In distinguishing between the first and second

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place we have always already distinguished two points in time; and, forAristotle, it is only in distinguishing these two successive ‘nows’ that werecognise that time has passed. It is in this way, then, that time is appre-hended as the ‘number’ or measurable duration of movement; forAristotle, time is ‘the number of movement (iριθμ�� κινxσ,ω�) accord-ing to the before and after’ [219b2].

γ – Time and the now

The account of time as the measurable duration of movement privilegesthe now as that by which we are able to delimit periods of time. Yetif the now in the guise of the before and after has the function of delim-iting periods of time, then what is counted in the counting of time is notthe ‘nows’, for the now is durationless and in any period there will be apotential infinity of them. Aristotle proceeds to determine the charac-teristics of the now in relation to time in comparing analogically thisrelation to that of the mobile thing and its movement. It is within thisquestioning of the status of the now in relation to time that, as I willargue, we do in fact encounter the possibility of an original thinking oftime beyond a conception of a mere succession of ‘nows’.

With the analogy Aristotle addresses the third phase of the aporeticconcerning the existence of time, since it emerges that the now is Janus-faced. From one perspective it is always the same, from another perspec-tive it is always different; it is ‘the same as subject (3 ποτ’ Dν), but differentas to its being (,�ναι)’ [219b10]. On the one hand, just as the moving bodyis the same particular thing in different places, so too the ‘now’ is alwaysthe same. This is not to say that the now is a subject as a thing that driftsfrom the future to the present and the past, but merely that there is alwaysa now; and that this permanence of the ‘now’ can be compared to that ofthe moving body throughout its motion.29 Yet just as the hupokeimenon ortode ti becomes other than it was in its motion, ‘as the Sophists distinguishbetween being Coriscus in the Lyceum and Coriscus in the market place’[21–2], so too the now at each moment is always different; each now is adifferent now from those which have preceded it.

There is always a now but at each time the now is always different,and, in this way, time at once ‘owes its continuity to the now and isdivided by it’ [220a5]. Aristotle compares this dual function of the nowin relation to time – and that of the mobile in relation to its movement –to that of a point on a line, for the point divides two parts or sections ofa line whilst making the parts two parts of the same line. It is necessaryto recognise that this analogy is limited, even ‘it is obvious that the nowis not a part of time, just as the division of motion is not part of motion



any more than points are of a line’ [19–20], since time and motion aresuccessive continua; the past and the future, like the prior and futurecourse of a movement, do not actually exist, they are not existent parts oftheir continua. Yet, as Aristotle continues, like the moving point on aline, insofar as the now is always different it is to be understood as alimit in relation to time, since it allows us to delimit periods of the lat-ter. Insofar as it is always the same, however, it is to be thought as num-ber for ‘limits are limits only of the particular thing they limit, whereasthe number 10, for instance, pertains equally to the ten horses, the sumof which it has defined, and to anything else numerable’ [22–4].

In relation to time, then, the now can be apprehended either as a limitor as number. Yet in both cases the now is not itself time. On the onehand, as a limit, given that it is not a period or part of time, the ‘now’ ‘isnot time but incidental to time’ [220a21–2]. On the other hand, as num-ber, it is not time but rather something self-identical which numberstime. Although the now is the most fundamental aspect of time insofaras it is that which guarantees its continuity, it is nevertheless not a partof time, and is a mere accident of it. Time, then, is other than the noweven if it can only exist on its basis, and Aristotle expresses this para-doxical state of affairs thus: ‘there is no time without the now, and nonow without time’ [b33–220a1].

δ – Heidegger’s delimitation of Physics IV

In any philosophical inquiry concerning time, one must, as Aristotlenotes revealingly, begin with the now, not only because it is the mostfundamental aspect of time, but also because it is the most immediateand intelligible aspect of time. In questioning time one must begin fromwhat is ‘more easily intelligible’, namely the now, just as in order todetermine the nature of movement one must begin from the movingbody, since the moving body is a particular being, a tode ti, which ‘move-ment is not’ [219b32]. Yet for as much as the analysis begins in privileg-ing the now, it finishes in showing that time is other than the now, evenif it can only exist by virtue of the latter. The possibility, therefore,remains open for a determination of time beyond a mere succession of‘nows’. The privilege that the now enjoys throughout Aristotle’s analysis,particularly within the account of time as the number of movement,does not preclude this. Could we not even say that the exoteric discourse,despite the fact that Aristotle does not counterpose it to any other, con-tains the seeds of its own destruction, and this precisely because it is anexoteric discourse on time that follows from a much more esoteric deter-mination of movement? Such is the argument of Pierre Aubenque. The

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argument is forceful, in every sense of the word: if, primarily, we take intoaccount that form or energeia, shortage or possibility and the hupokeimenonare not parts of a being, but rather three aspects of the being-moved of abeing, and if, secondly, we recognise that these moments correspond tothe future, past and present respectively, then it should come as no sur-prise that within Physics IV neither the past, nor the present, nor thefuture are existent parts of time. Thus, as Aubenque writes:

The vocabulary of part and whole, of ‘composition’ […] must be ban-ished if one recognises that it is not here a question merely of a divi-sion into parts, but of the manifestation of the structure thatindissolubly unifies and divides, that is, in one word, ‘ecstatic’, of thebeing in movement.30

The argument is all the more forceful for the fact that Aubenque doesnot even treat the privileging of the now within Aristotle’s analysis as aproblem. Yet on this reading, a reading that leads Aubenque to write ofan ‘ecstatic time’ in Aristotle, time is not a being, but is rather constitu-tive of the ecstatic structure of the being of beings insofar as they haveat least the possibility of movement. Certainly, the argument has theform of an imperative, since, once again, Aristotle does not explicitlyforego the exoteric discourse concerning time. Yet it remains the casethat such a non-vulgar conception of time is required by and implied inAristotle’s own determination of movement.

Our access to such an ecstatic time remains blocked as long as we con-tent ourselves with a determination of time as the mere measurableduration of movement, as a mathematically determinable passage oftime. In §81 of Being and Time, however, Heidegger does offer the out-line of a positive reading – an ‘existential-ontological’ interpretation –of Aristotle’s definition of time as the ‘number of movement accordingto the before and after’, which seeks to reveal the possibility of an orig-inal thinking of time, time as other than measurable duration, in thisdefinition itself. On this interpretation, time is ‘that which is counted inthe movement which we encounter within the horizon of the earlierand later’ [SZ 421]. Heidegger reads, thus, the before and after as thehorizons divided by the now, rather than as two successive ‘nows’, andhe elaborates this with the example of following the movement of thehand of a clock:

Time is that which is counted and shows itself when one follows thetravelling pointer, counting and making present in such a way that



this making-present temporalises itself in an ecstatical unity with theretaining and awaiting which are horizonally open according to theearlier and later [SZ 421].

We say now ‘here’ now ‘there’, now at 5 seconds past the minute, nowat 6. In marking time with each now we can count time, yet each now isonly encountered within the horizon of the before and after, insofar aswe at once retain the past and expect the future. This horizon formed bythis ecstatic expecting and retaining in relation to the now constitutesthe unity of a temporality that is other than, irreducible to and the pre-supposition of the time that is counted.

In the lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology of 1927,Heidegger offers an interpretation of Physics IV that seems to go in thesame direction. Insofar as the now, not being a part of time, is nothingin itself and merely separates the past from the future, it is alreadystretched beyond itself in the direction of the past and the future:

In the now as such there is already present a reference to the no-longer and the not-yet. It has dimension within itself; it stretches outtoward a not-yet and no-longer. The not-yet and no-longer are notpatched onto the now as foreign but belong to its very content.Because of this dimensional content, the now has within itself the char-acter of transition [G24 351–2/248].

In unifying and dividing the past and the future the now is nothing but atransition from the past to the future. In this sense it has dimension, nottemporal dimension as a part of time, but rather a pre-quantifiable dimen-sion which is a stretch insofar as the now must stretch itself out in orderto at once hold together and separate the past and future. This reading ofthe now as transition is offered, however, on the basis of an interpretationof the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of movement and of Aristotle’s theory of conti-nuity. With regard to locomotion, for example, there can be no move-ment at any isolated spatial point of the movement because each point ofthe dimension that the moving body traverses is without extension. Onecannot reconstruct the locomotion of a being in adding up, as it were, ortracing all the different points which it has traversed; in this way we onlydiscover a being in different places and not movement itself. If, there-fore, movement is movement away from something to something, thenthe away from and the to must be understood primarily as stretch-like, asthe horizon of the being in movement. One can only apprehend the

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movement of a being within this horizon of a from/to, a horizon whichHeidegger interprets, again, in terms of Dasein’s ecstatic temporality.31 Inorder to apprehend a being in movement we must retain its prior pathand expect its future trajectory. The argument concerning the transitionalcharacter of the ‘now’, therefore, is that it is due to this character that thetime in which movement appears does not allow for the disintegration ofmovement into a series of static parts. In short, the argument is that thecontinuity of movement requires an ecstatic thinking of movement and,consequently, a thinking of ecstatic time.

The interpretations advanced in the Basic Problems of Phenomenology,then, show us that Heidegger perceives at least the possibility of readingAristotle positively in relation to the two essential characteristics of thevulgar conception of time: the reification of time and the concomitantprivileging of the ‘now’. Yet, Being and Time and the Basic Problems ofPhenomenology provide a further argument concerning what the vulgarconception of time fails to bring into view: world-time, which is time asforming the horizon of Dasein’s concern with things. It is necessary toexamine this argument in order to comprehend the full scope ofHeidegger’s delimitation of Physics IV.

World-time, for Heidegger, has three essential characteristics. Primarily,before being measured numerically, time is encountered as the pre-thematic horizon of Dasein’s dealings with that which it is concerned.When we tell the time from the clock, neither the clock nor time itselfare the ultimate object of our concern, but we are rather concerned withhow much time there remains in order to carry out and complete the taskat hand; the time I am trying to determine is always ‘time to, time inorder to do this or that, time for […] this or that’ [G24 364/258]. Time,thus, has the character of significance, it is always ‘appropriate’ or ‘inap-propriate’ time, and our everyday dealings with the things of the worldoccur as a guiding oneself according to time, a taking time for some-thing, a taking into account of time. This taking into account of time as‘time to’, is a guiding oneself according to one’s own ecstatic temporality.Such pre-thematic reckoning, therefore, is both prior to and the condi-tion of the determinate, numerical measurement of time in the use ofthe clock; the latter arises as a ‘modification’ of the former. Second,world-time has the character of datability. Every ‘now’ that we express inour time-reckoning ‘by its nature is a now-when’; it is ‘related to somebeing by reference to which it has a date’ [G24 381/269]. The ‘now’ that weexpress always means a ‘now when such and such is occurring or is exis-tent’. In other words, what is expressed in saying ‘now’ is not some abstractfree-floating thing but rather Dasein’s making-present of beings. The



same applies for what is expressed in saying ‘then’ and ‘at-a-former-time’.The then is a then-when, the ‘at-a-former-time’ is a ‘then-when’ in thesense of the past, and what is expressed in both cases is the expectingand retaining, the horizons of the future and the past, of Dasein’secstatic temporality. Third, the now is spanned and stretched withinitself, as when we say ‘now’ meaning ‘now, during the lecture’ or ‘notnow!’ when someone disturbs our concentration when working. The‘now’ is not originally a point, but in dating beings it is rather a stretchthat varies in each case.

For Heidegger, then, the vulgar conception of time as a mere free-floating sequence of extant nows passes over the significance, databilityand stretchedness of world time. This passing over would be nothingother than a fallenness resulting from Dasein’s understanding of itselfand its world in terms of the things in the world as vorhanden.

The covering up of the specific structural moments of world time, thecovering up of their origination in temporality, and the covering upof temporality itself – all have their ground in that mode of being ofDasein which we call falling [G24 384/271].

Yet how does this argument concerning the world-time effaced in thevulgar conception of time relate to the work of Aristotle? First of all,Heidegger attempts to draw a thinking of the now as stretch-like fromAristotle’s determination of the ‘now’, so there is no critique involvedhere.32 Second, it would seem impossible to claim that Aristotle failed torecognise the datability of time, since time, though not movement itself,is always something that pertains to movement, something that embracesbeings in movement and rest. Hence if Aristotle does not explicitly artic-ulate an idea of datability, then it would not have been difficult for himto do so. There remains, then, the significance of time as the horizonwith which Dasein reckons pre-numerically and pre-thematically in itseveryday concern with equipment. Concerning this point alone doesHeidegger’s account of world-time offer the possibility of a critique ofAristotle. Yet not perceiving the originally pre-thematic significance oftime would not preclude an apprehension of time in its basic ecstaticstructure. Hence the argument is, in the end, quite peripheral.

The arguments concerning world-time have little purchase on thework of the Stagirite, and Heidegger, as we have seen, does perceive atleast the possibility of a positive reading of Aristotle’s determination oftime. Nevertheless, in the end, Heidegger holds that although the ‘nowsare not pieced together into a whole’, Aristotle nevertheless ‘characterises

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time primarily as a sequence of nows’, thus expressing in ‘clear concep-tual form, for the first time and for a long time after, the common under-standing of time, so that his view of time corresponds to the naturalconcept of time’ [G24 329/232].33 It is to be remarked herethat Heidegger places the emphasis less on the reification of time thanon the primacy of the now, and that there is also a certain ambiguity inthe argument: Aristotle’s view corresponds to the common understanding.It would, in fact, be better to say that his determination of time corre-sponds to our common understanding of time, given that Physics IV is thefirst comprehensive philosophical account of time as such. Section 81 ofBeing and Time is similarly ambiguous in discussing, in fact, the possibilityof a positive appropriation of Physics IV. Aristotle would ‘move in thedirection of’[SZ 241] the vulgar conception of time and it is only afterthe elaboration of the analytic of Dasein that it might be possible toappropriate Physics IV in a positive manner. Quite understandably, per-haps, a thinking of the meaning, that is, the temporality of being hasfirst to define itself in its radical difference from the tradition beforebeing able to positively appropriate the latter.

Heidegger, then, does not exclude the possibility of a positive appro-priation of Aristotle’s account of time. Would this mean that the nega-tive claim, advanced somewhat hastily in §6 of Being and Time,according to which the Greeks ‘misunderstood’ the relation of beingand time ‘in interpreting ousia as parousia’ would be a mere ‘prejudice’,as Pierre Aubenque claims?34 It is difficult to decide. But it is necessary torecognise that it is one thing to assert the possibility of a double readingof Aristotle, and another thing entirely to claim that the less generousreading is a prejudice. To state, as Aristotle does, that the future, presentand past are not parts of time is one thing, whereas elaborating thestructure of time as an ecstatic temporality is another thing entirely.There is, in the end, no doubt that the exoteric approach to time and theconcern to account for time as the calculable duration of movementimpose a limitation on Aristotle’s philosophical vision. Hence theapproach that Jacques Derrida formulates to Heidegger’s work seemsmore apposite than Aubenque’s attempt to locate a mere prejudice in it.For Derrida, it is necessary to read the texts of the tradition both inaccordance with and beyond certain propositions or theses thatHeidegger articulates, such as the argument that Aristotle expresses avulgar conception of time in Physics IV.35 Yet this imperative issues, atbottom, from Heidegger’s work itself, since it is precisely his historicalthinking that leads us to recognise the possibility of both ‘positive’ and‘negative’ readings of the texts of the tradition, readings that can stresseither the originality or the limits of these texts.



4The Moment of Truth

The supposed clarity of we moderns rests only on the fact thatwe have done away with the problems [G21 168].

The preceding chapter of this study showed that despite Heidegger’scharge in 1927 concerning the naivety of Greek ontology, the analyticof Dasein is nourished by an appropriation of Aristotle’s account ofmovement. The question of movement, however, is but one aspect ofHeidegger’s positive appropriation of Aristotle in the dismantling returnof the early 1920s. The texts from this period show that the elaborationof the analytic of Dasein draws, in addition, from the richness of theanthropology inherent in Aristotle’s practical writings. In particular,the essay of 1922, Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect toAristotle, shows that Aristotle’s account of phronesis or prudence is offundamental importance for the analysis of Dasein’s authenticity, itsauthentic appropriation of itself as a being-possible. This would mean,then, that in the course of the 1920s Heidegger would have developedone aspect of Aristotle’s determination of human being as a remedy tothe ontological naivety and inauthenticity concerning human beingfrom which it itself would suffer. If not exactly a ‘paradox’,1 this iscertainly remarkable.

The leading aim of this chapter is to examine the account of prudencein the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, and to interrogate themeaning and possibility of Heidegger’s appropriation of it. It can be saidthat the question of prudence becomes a focal point of Heidegger’sinterpretation in the early 1920s because it implies the questions of tem-porality and movement specifically in relation to Aristotle’s account ofhuman being. Yet the account of prudence involves another of thethemes of the destruction of the traditional content of ancient ontology

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that Heidegger sketches in §6 of Being and Time. As I indicated in theintroduction to this study, the meanings of being that the destruction isto examine are not only being as being-produced and being as constantpresence, but also being as truth. This third aspect of the problematichas, in fact, a quite particular status, insofar as the destruction of thetraditional content of Aristotle’s determination of being and truth is dis-cussed, if not presented fully, within the body of the text of Being andTime itself, particularly in §§33 and 44.

The account of prudence in the Nicomachean Ethics involves an idea oftruth since Aristotle describes it as a mode of iληθ,j,ιν, of revealing orbeing-in-the-truth. Before turning directly to Heidegger’s interpretationof prudence in the second section of the present chapter, therefore, it isnecessary to examine the destruction of the traditional content ofAristotle’s determination of truth that Heidegger seeks to effect. Withinthe lecture course of 1925–6 entitled Logic: The Question of Truth,Heidegger announces his intentions in enumerating three claims thatphenomenology as fundamental ontology aims to overturn [G21 128]:first, that the site of truth is the judgement or proposition; second, thattruth is a correspondence of thought with thing and third, that thehistorical origin of both claims is to be found in the work of Aristotle.I begin with the first two claims before turning directly to the work ofAristotle.

4.1 Destroying the traditional content of Aristotle’saccount of truth

α – The assertion and the primordial phenomenon of truth

The originally scholastic definition of truth as adequatio intellectus et rei,an adequation or correspondence of the thing with thought, is famously‘assumed as granted’2 by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. Truth, onthis account, is the correspondence of the subjective representations orconcepts bound together in a judgement, a judgement expressed by thelinguistic proposition, with the state of affairs judged. Thus, as Kantwrites: ‘Truth and illusion are not in the object so far as it is intuited, butin the judgement about it so far as it is thought.’3 The site of truth is thejudgement, and it is true insofar as it agrees with or corresponds to thethings judged; the false judgement, for its part, is one that does notcorrespond to the things.

As seemingly self-evident and traditional as it may be, Heidegger arguesthat such a conception of truth as an agreement or correspondence ofknowledge with its object is profoundly problematic [SZ 216]: how can



thing and thought agree if they are two fundamentally different sorts ofbeings? They cannot be equal, precisely because they are of fundamen-tally different orders, and yet the idea that they should be merely simi-lar is insufficient, for knowledge is supposed to give us knowledge ofthings just as they are, and not to be merely similar to the things that itknows. Posed in this way, the problem is merely one form of the prob-lem of the relation between mind and body, between the real and theideal. It is, however, in seeking to unearth the ontological foundationsof the correspondence theory of truth that §§33 and 44 of Being andTime propose an account of propositional truth as a ‘being-uncovering(Entdeckend-sein)’.

On this account, the truth of the assertion is not to be understood asthe correspondence of subjective representations to an objective state ofaffairs, because the proposition or assertion is directly related to beings asan uncovering or ‘pointing-out (Aufzeigen)’ of them. The idea that anassertion expresses isolated representations in the mind simply ‘beliesthe phenomenal facts’ [SZ 217] of the making of an assertion. If we makethe assertion that, for example, the mirror is hanging askew on the wall,we are not directed to a subjective representation of the mirror butrather to the mirror, even in the absence of the mirror itself. It is neces-sary to recognise that ordinarily and spontaneously we make assertionsconcerning things without the advent of psychic or subjective represen-tations of these things, and that we understand perfectly well the senseof the assertion – again even in the absence of its object – without suchrepresentations ‘in the mind’. The assertion, for Heidegger, ‘is a way ofbeing towards the thing itself that is’ [SZ 218] and it is, in other words, amode of intentionality.

In this way the assertion enables ‘what is already manifest’ to be‘made explicitly manifest in its definite character’ [SZ 155] insofar as ithighlights and brings explicitly to light a particular state of affairs inwhat has already been pre-thematically apprehended within Dasein’sconcerned circumspection. For Heidegger, Dasein primarily encountersbeings within a hermeneutic as-structure, of which the primary mode,according to §32 of Being and Time, is Zuhandenheit. Beings are seen assuitable or as unsuitable for the task at hand, and thus they have alreadybeen subject to a pre-thematic interpretation. It is on the basis of thispre-thematic interpretation that there arises the possibility of furtherdetermining and interpreting beings through what Heidegger terms – forreasons that will become clear – the apophantic as-structure of the asser-tion. In asserting a predicate of a subject, a being is given a definitecharacter by the assertion. The assertion ‘the board is black’, for example,

The Moment of Truth 113


points up and points out the board in a determinate manner, namelyin its being black. The assertion thus achieves a certain ‘narrowing ofcontent’ [SZ 155] in relation to its object, since it isolates and makesmanifest the being according to one or to a limited number of its char-acteristics. Assertion, however, does not automatically reduce its ‘object’to what is vorhanden, since it can point something out as zuhanden.Saying that the hammer is ‘too heavy’ for the task at hand is not yet theobjectifying statement ‘the hammer is heavy’, and for Heidegger thereare many ‘intermediate gradations’ [SZ 158] between Dasein’s pre-thematicconcerned dealings and pure objectifying statements. In any event, forHeidegger, the assertion articulates something as something, it deter-mines something in an explicit manner, and in this way it is a ‘pointing-out that gives something a definite character and which communicates’[SZ 156] this pointing-out to others.

Although, as we will see, Being and Time claims to find such anaccount of the assertion as a pointing-out in Aristotle, it comes toHeidegger more directly from the work of his teacher, Edmund Husserl.The first Logical Investigation distinguishes the order of expression(Ausdruck) from that of indication (Anzeichen), expressive signs fromindicative signs.4 The latter are without meaning (Bedeutung), since ‘tomean is not a particular way of being a sign in the sense of indicating some-thing’.5 Husserl determines the indicating of both natural and conven-tional signs as a function of what one has traditionally termed theassociation of ideas.6 The knot in my handkerchief, for example, wouldmake me recall, by association, what I was supposed to remember.Expressive signs, however, are not, in essence, indicative. Expressivesigns are the signs of language, linguistic signs, and these do not havemeaning by the association of words with subjective representations.The very idea of language as a sign is in question here but attention tothe modality of our own experience is sufficient to undermine thecertainties of any account of language as inert signs indicating mentalimages: the acts of speaking, listening or reading a newspaper involvenothing like the decoding or association of inert signs with such images.Of course, one can call to mind images in order to understand the mean-ing of a word, but this is by no means necessary to its meaning. On thispoint, Husserl presents us with a sort of challenge: ‘Let a man read awork in an abstract field of knowledge, and understand the author’sassertions perfectly, and let him then try to see what more there is tosuch reading than the words he understands.’7

For Husserl, understanding, thus, cannot be reduced to intuition, ineither of its perceptive or imaginative modalities. In a sense, Descartes



had already shown this with the example of the impossibility of mentallyenvisioning a chiliagon, a thousand-sided figure,8 and after him Husserlcan be understood to criticise Aristotle’s argument in On the Soul that forthe ‘thinking soul images (φαντbσματα) take the place of direct percep-tions’, and that the soul ‘never thinks without an image’ [431a14–17].Yet Husserl does not merely aim to overturn an account of language assounds and visual signs indicating mental images, but also any accountthat separates a sense or concept from the word itself. For Husserl, in theexperience of language ‘we live entirely in the consciousness of mean-ing, of understanding, which does not lapse when accompanyingimagery does so’ and this being conscious of a meaning suffices to dis-tinguish ‘the meaningful sign from the mere sign, that is, the soundedword set up as a physical object in our presentations of sense’.9 This is tosay that as an expression the physicality of the sign in a certain mannereffaces itself as a mere inert thing and manifests itself as a meaning.Certainly, we can stare at written words as if they were merely arbitrary,meaningless marks on paper, and we can repeat a word until it becomesa meaningless sound. Yet this merely makes manifest that words areordinarily infused with meaning, animated by a meaning intention, andit is with such a conception of infusion or animation that Husserlattempts to move beyond the traditional opposition of word and con-cept as sign and signified. The meaning intention that animates words,however, is in its own right always and already a being-directed towardsan object or state of affairs meant. Expressive meaning is a ‘pointing to(hinzeigen)’10 what is intended insofar as it is aimed at an object or stateof affairs, but without the intuitive or imaginative presence of the latter,this intention remains empty and unfulfilled.

Husserl’s analysis of expression is original, and it has been developednot only by Heidegger but also by the French phenomenologist MauriceMerleau-Ponty.11 Yet, in the course of the first Logical InvestigationHusserl seems to shrink back from the fecundity of his own thinking.For the claim is made that actual speech is always sullied by an indica-tive function, and that expression in its purity resides solely in a soli-tary monologue of the soul. In Speech and Phenomena Jacques Derridahas drawn our attention to this deeply problematic recourse to an ideaof a private language, showing how it enables the transcendental ideal-ism that will be developed in an explicit form after the LogicalInvestigations.12 Somewhat paradoxically, expression here is at its mostexpressive when it does not leave the sphere of consciousness, a con-sciousness that is translucent and purely present-to-itself. Heideggerhas by no means the same metaphysical commitments, although certain



passages of §33 of Being and Time do seem to repeat Husserl’s idealisminsofar as they advance an account of a discourse or Rede that would beexpressed or externalised in the words of a language.13 In the finalchapter of this study I will show how such an idealistic and dualisticapproach to language is overturned within Heidegger’s reflection onpoetry in the 1930s, but the basic orientation of Husserl’s determina-tion of language as expression is essential for his account of theassertion: although it is a mode of being directed to or intendingbeings, language, as something other than an inert present-at-handobject, requires neither the perception nor the imagination of thebeings meant to have meaning. This is undoubtedly a condition of allkinds of irresponsibility and idle talk or Gerede, as Heidegger will showin §35 of Being and Time, but it nevertheless constitutes the peculiarvirtue of language itself.

In Heidegger’s terms, however, the demonstration of the truth of theassertion as a pointing-out consists in:

nothing else than that this thing is the very entity which oneintends in the assertion. What comes up for confirmation is thatthis entity is pointed out by the being in which the assertion ismade – which is being towards what is put forward in the assertion;thus what is to be confirmed is that such being uncovers the entitytowards which it is. What gets demonstrated is the being-uncoveringof the assertion [SZ 218].

The assertion as an ‘uncovering is confirmed’ or demonstrated as true‘when that which is put forward in the assertion shows itself as that verysame thing’ [SZ 218], when the state of affairs shows itself and is appre-hended as the state of affairs that it was presumed to be. The truth of theassertion does not consist of the comparison and agreement of subjec-tive representations or concepts and objects, but rather of the appre-hension of the identity of what was merely presumed, pointed-out oremptily intended in the assertion with the things themselves. Thus, ifthe truth of the assertion is to be thought as an adequation, as Heideggerreasons in 1925, the adequation is not a relation between two things,but rather one between two modes of intentionality; it is the ‘commen-suration (adequatio) of what is presumed with the intuited subjectmatter itself (res)’ [G20 69/51].14

Prior to any theory of correspondence, then, from Heidegger’sphenomenological perspective the assertion is true as a pointing-outand uncovering of beings. Yet truth, on this account, is not only



a characteristic of the proposition, but also of the things ‘proposed’.The beings uncovered by the assertion are themselves true, precisely tothe extent that they are uncovered, and in this case truth means ‘being-uncovered’ [SZ 220] rather than being-uncovering. The uncovering andbeing-uncovered of beings by means of the assertion does not, how-ever, constitute the most primordial phenomenon of truth. Accordingto Being and Time, in fact, there exist two further levels of truth. First,the beings encountered within Dasein’s circumspection are already trueand pre-thematically uncovered insofar as they are discovered andinterpreted by the hermeneutic understanding of our everyday exis-tence. Second, and still more fundamentally, in interpreting, under-standing and thus discovering the beings that it is not, for HeideggerDasein has already understood, interpreted and disclosed (erschlossen),however improperly, its own being as a being-in-the-world to itself.This disclosure is the ‘most primordial phenomenon of truth’ [SZ 220].Dasein is always ‘in the truth’ [SZ 221] insofar as it always has someunderstanding of its own being. However, given that Dasein’s authenticdisclosure of itself to itself occurs only on the basis of its originarythrownness and fallenenness, in which it fails to grasp authentically itsown being, Dasein is always and already in ‘untruth’ [SZ 222]. To be sure,if we hold fast to the idea that truth can only be the correspondence ofa judgement with its object, these uses of the term truth may seemunlikely, if not impossible. Yet the fact that both Dasein’s hermeneuticuncovering of the beings that it is not and its disclosure of its ownbeing are prior to the truth of the assertion means, for Heidegger, thatthe ‘proposition is not the site of truth, but rather truth is the siteof the proposition’ [G21 135]. The original site of truth is Dasein’sbeing-in-the-world, and in positing the assertion as the site of truth thetraditional account gets things the wrong way round. It suffers fromsomething of a retrospective illusion, since ‘that which is last in theorder of the way things are connected in their foundations existentiallyand ontologically, is regarded ontically and factically as that which isfirst and closest to us’ [SZ 225].

β – Aristotle and the logos apophantikos

Fundamental ontology seeks not simply to ‘shake off’ the traditionalaccount of truth, but rather to appropriate it at its origins in retrieving aconception of the truth of the assertion as an uncovering from Aristotle.This is to say that Heidegger argues against a long tradition that propo-sitional truth is not a question of correspondence or agreement in thework of the Stagirite. This may seem to be something of a thankless task



given the opening lines of the treatise On Interpretation, which proposesa threefold distinction concerning the essence of language:

Words spoken are symbols (σjμβολα) of affections (παθημbτων) ofthe soul and written words are those of words spoken. As writing, soalso is speech not the same for all races of men. But the affections ofthe soul themselves, of which these words are primarily signs, are thesame for the whole of mankind, as are also the things of which theseaffections are likenesses [16a4–8].

The spoken word, that is, the material sound, is a σjμ�ολον of theaffections or παθxματα of the soul, just as the written word is a symbolof the spoken word. Aristotle nowhere explicates the meaning of theidea of symbol, but these oral and written symbols are different for dif-ferent races of men, and thus they are a matter of convention and socialinstitution. Language or logos is a vocal sound that has meaning not bynature but ‘by convention (κατn συνθxκην)’ [17a2], insofar as thevocal sound becomes and is instituted as a symbol.15 Precisely becausethe relation between word and affection of the soul is conventional, theequation of the sign or σημ,"ον with the symbol in the above passageis problematic. In the First Analytics the sign is defined as a ‘necessary orprobable demonstrative premise’, since ‘that which coexists with some-thing else, or before or after whose happening something else has hap-pened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being’[70a8–10]. The sign is a relation of one thing to another, a naturalrelation such as that of cause to effect, and in this sense wet streets arethe sign of recent rainfall. The relation of vocal sound to the sense oraffection of the soul, however, cannot be understood as such a naturalrelation, and for this reason one can say that the use of the idea of thesign as equivalent to that of the symbol is improper, notwithstandingthe fact that the adjective Aristotle uses to describe language as mean-ingful or significant, namely σημαντικ��, derives from the same root asσημ,"ον.16

What the spoken word symbolises, however, namely the affectionsof the soul, are the same for all men and are likenesses, �μοι%ματα, ofthe things which themselves are also identical for us all. In the follow-ing paragraph of the text Aristotle characterises these states of mind asν�ημα [10], thoughts. As likenesses of things, the affections orthoughts in the soul have a more natural and immediate relation to thethings themselves than they have to the spoken word by which theyare expressed.



How are states of mind to be understood as likenesses of the thingsthemselves? Is Aristotle simply proposing a conception of words as signsof psychic images, images that would resemble things? The passage fromOn the Soul that I cited earlier, in which Aristotle states that the soulnever thinks without an image, would seem to offer a positive responseto this question. In the lecture course of 1925–6, however, Heideggerchallenges such a traditional reading of the text of On Interpretation inunderlining the fact that Aristotle writes pathemata and not pathe:

it does not say παθη, which at best could mean condition, butπαθxματα, that which encounters and is taken up as the encounter-ing, affection in a broader sense. And �μοι%ματα means that whichhas been made equivalent, what �μο�ω� Oχ,ι, what as an encounter-ing is in the same way as beings themselves; it comports itself in thesame way, that is, the perceiving as that which is to be perceived, theperceived of the perceiving; perceiving gives beings themselves and itlets them encounter as they are [G21 167].

On this account, the equivalence or likeness concerns not two beings,subjective representation and objective thing, but rather the distinctionbetween the apprehending of the thing and the thing apprehended, theseeing and the thing seen. But what would it mean to argue that theword, if it is not symbolic of the things themselves, is symbolic of ourmodes and manners of apprehending beings? And if this were the dis-tinction that Aristotle articulates, how is it that he is able to separate thetwo elements so clearly in the passage itself? Heidegger’s argument is dif-ficult, and by 1927 it would seem to have been retracted since in Beingand Time we read only, and without doubt correctly, that the conceptionof representations in the soul as likenesses of things articulated in thefirst chapter of On Interpretation is ‘by no means proposed as an explicitdefinition of the essence of truth’ [SZ 214].

The question of truth arises explicitly in On Interpretation with thedistinction of the proposition from other modes of discourse. ForAristotle, all language is significant or has meaning, even the differentparts of language taken in isolation, namely noun and verb. Every wordis an annunciation or φbσι�, but it cannot stand alone if it is to be anaffirmation (κατbφbσι�) or negation (iποφbσι�); ‘the word manmeans something, but not that he is or he is not: there is affirmation ornegation only if one adds something else’ [b28]. Affirmation or negationcan be articulated in the form of the copula or in the verbal ending,but the proposition requires the holding-together and, at one and the



same time, the holding-apart, an identity in difference, of a ‘subject’and ‘predicate’:

Just as there are thoughts in our minds without truth or falsity, whilethere are others at times that have necessarily one or the other, soalso it is in our speech, for combination and division (σjνθ,σι� κα δια�ρ,σι�) belong to truth and falsity [16a10–13].

It should be noted that Aristotle maintains the distinction betweenthought and speech here, but an assertion such as ‘the board is black’requires a synthesis and a holding-apart of ‘board’ and ‘black’. It is onlyin being combined thus in the guise of an affirmation or negation thatwords and sentences can be true or false:

Every sentence (λ�γο�) is meaningful (σημαντικ��), though notnaturally, as we have observed, but by convention. Not all are exhib-itive (iποφαντικ��), but those only that have truth or falsity in them(Rν 6 τ� iληθ,j,ιν m ψ,jδ,σθαι cπbρχ,ι). A prayer is, for instance, asentence but has neither truth nor falsity [17a1–5].

The affirmation or negation proper to the proposition or iπ�φανσι� iswhat distinguishes it from utterances such as prayers, commands andthe like, which, as Aristotle continues, are to be examined in the studyof rhetoric and poetry.

Heidegger’s claim that Aristotle has apprehended the truth of the asser-tion as an uncovering draws heavily on the literal sense of the terms usedin the above passage. The ‘logic’ lecture course of 1925–6 offers thefollowing translation of its second sentence: ‘only a pointing-out letting beseen is the discourse in which revealing or concealing carry and determinethe authentic speaking-intention.’17 Our attention is drawn, thus, to theliteral sense of the adjective apophantikos, which I translated above, some-what clumsily, as ‘exhibitive’. The proposition is here an iποφα�ν,σθαι ofbeings, which literally means, given the middle-voice form of the verb, aletting-be-seen of beings.18 Moreover, Heidegger underlines both theprivative alpha of the Greek a-letheia and the verbal form aletheuein thatAristotle employs. The logos apophantikos is thus to be thought as an un-covering of beings themselves, a ‘bringing something to light’[G21 131] or a ‘bringing into the open’ [G21 142] of beings. The falseproposition, for its part, would not be one that simply failed to correspondto beings, but it would be a covering over or concealing of beings since,again, Aristotle uses the middle-voice form pseudesthai, a being-concealed.



Yet, Heidegger’s argument concerning the logos apophantikos is by nomeans exhausted by such etymological considerations. Beyond the textof On Interpretation it is characteristic of Aristotle, as Pierre Aubenquenotes, to speak not ‘of judgement, but only of the proposition’.19 InMetaphysics Gamma, for example, Aristotle defines truth itself as simplysaying that what is, is and that what is not, is not.20 Thus, as Heideggerargues in reading this passage:

The essential thing lies in that discourse is not grasped in the sense ofjudgment […] but rather as discourse, as an iποφα�ν,σθαι, a lettingbe seen of beings. If one has understood this basic structure of λNγ,ινthen it is not possible to find something in this determination oftruth and falsity that would give grounds for the determination oftruth as image and representation of beings in consciousness in thesense of a corresponding [G21 163].

The fact that Aristotle can offer a definition of truth without referring toany account of representations as the intermediary between word andthing is, for Heidegger, testimony to the fact that Aristotle apprehendsthe logos apophantikos as a letting-be-seen.

Furthermore, in the Sophistical Refutations Aristotle even describes therelation of word to thing rather than word to thought, as symbolic: ‘it isnot possible to draw into discussion the things themselves, but insteadof them, we must use their names as symbols’ [165a7]. One might sup-pose that the absence here of an intermediary between word and thingis a condensed expression of a more elaborate doctrine. In addition, onemight suppose that the suppression of the intermediary is natural andlegitimate, since the affections are already similar to the things them-selves.21 Such are the arguments of Pierre Aubenque. Yet this allowsHeidegger to argue at the end of the 1920s that:

what Aristotle sees quite obscurely under the title σjμβολον, seesonly approximately, and without any explication, in looking at itquite ingeniously, is nothing other than what we call transcendence.There is language only in the case of a being that by its essence tran-scends [G29/30 420/308].

Literally, symbol means that which is thrown or held together. Yet onthis account what would be held together is not the word and subjectiverepresentation but rather the word and its meaning as a pointing out, aletting-be-seen of beings, and this within the open region of Dasein’s



transcendence or being-in-the-world. Heidegger’s argument is certainlyingenious, if not violent, but it is not groundless.

Concerning the question of whether an account of truth as corre-spondence is to be found within it, there are, then, two possibleapproaches to Aristotle’s determination of the logos apophantikos. Thesetwo approaches exploit the ambiguity of the Aristotelian corpus in dia-metrically opposed ways. It can be argued that the passages discussingthe logos without any mention of subjective representations as the inter-mediary between word and thing merely articulate a condensed form ofa more elaborate doctrine, a doctrine of correspondence. Conversely,one can argue that in these passages Aristotle apprehends the originaltruth of the logos apophantikos as a revealing and letting-be-seen ofbeings; and, consequently, that the passages which do seem to describerepresentations in the soul as binding word and thing express but a lossof or a falling away from this original truth of the logos. It is impossibleto decide which of these two approaches allows for the more ‘accurate’interpretation of the work of the Stagirite. Yet the second approach con-stitutes one of the most original and challenging aspects of Heidegger’sphenomenological interpretation of Aristotle.

γ – Truth and being: Heidegger’s interpretation of Metaphysics Θ, 10

As I noted in the introduction to this chapter, Heidegger seeks to over-turn not only the argument that Aristotle presents a correspondencetheory of truth, but also the claim that the Stagirite determines the siteof truth as the proposition. In what way, then, can Aristotle be under-stood to think truth more broadly or profoundly than as merely a prop-erty of the proposition? First of all, in the Metaphysics Aristotle describeshis predecessors as those who ‘philosophised’ or ‘theorised abouttruth’.22 By no means does this imply that metaphysics is to be reducedto a theory of knowledge, an epistemology, for philosophy is hereexplicitly characterised as ‘knowledge of the truth’ insofar as it isknowledge of the principles and causes of beings, which causes are true‘above and before anything else’.23 Truth here determines beings intheir being and thus Heidegger can write in Being and Time: the‘iλxθ,ια that Aristotle equates with πρdγμα and φαιν�μ,να signifiesthe things themselves; it signifies what shows itself – entities in the howof their uncoveredness’ [SZ 219].

Moreover, in the book of definitions, Metaphysics Delta, we find adefinition of falsity that clearly, at least in intention, distinguishes



falsity as a property of the proposition, from falsity as determiningthings. ‘False’ are

such things as really exist, but whose nature it is to seem eithersuch as they are not, or like things which are unreal; chiaroscuroand dreams. For these are really something, but not that of whichthey create the impression. Things, then, are called false in thesesenses: either because they themselves are unreal, or because theimpression derived from them is that of something unreal[1024b22–4].

Certainly, the examples provided here are of the order of what is under-stood as representation: painting and the work of imagination are falsebecause they would give us the impression of reality when they are notthat reality at all. Nevertheless, if a thing gives the impression of beingsomething that it is not, that thing is false, falsity here being a charac-teristic of the thing itself.

Furthermore, in On the Soul Aristotle describes perception or α$σθησι�as always true:

The perception of proper objects (τaν 1δ�ων) is true, or is only capa-ble of error to the least possible degree. Next comes perception thatthey are attributes, and here a possibility of error arises[428b18–20].24

Normally when we perceive something, say a boat, what we perceive isin fact a boat, and thus the perception is true. Of course, from afar wemay think that we see a boat when in fact it turns out to be an outcropof rocks, but such a case constitutes only the exception to the rule thatperception is itself true. The genuine possibility of error emerges onlywhen we determine the attributes of things, when we determine some-thing as something:

Assertion, like affirmation, states an attribute of a subject, and isalways true or false; but this is not always so with νο8�: the thinkingof the definition in the sense of the quiddity is true and does notarticulate something as something [430b26–28].25

The determination of something as something, which for Aristotle is adianoia, is always either true or false. The apprehension of the essence or



quiddity of a thing, however, is not achieved by means of such reasoning,but rather through pure intuition, noein or nous. This intuition is alwaystrue in the sense that we either apprehend the essence of something orwe do not. The contrary of truth in this case is not falsity but pure igno-rance. On this evidence, then, the site of truth is in no way restricted tothe assertion in Aristotle’s work, and, as Heidegger underlines, in OnInterpretation it is not truth that is determined in terms of the proposi-tion but, on the contrary, the proposition that is determined in terms oftruth. Aristotle thinks truth from different perspectives, and inHeidegger’s terms ‘the phenomenon of uncovering has several essential“aspects” ’ [G21 170].

Further evidence that Aristotle does not restrict truth to being a prop-erty of the proposition can be gained from considering the problem ofbeing as truth in Metaphysics Epsilon. As was noted at the end of thefirst chapter of this study, within the discussion of the manifold sensesof being Aristotle disqualifies being as truth and non-being as falsityfrom the philosophical enquiry to follow in the central books, since‘falsity and truth are not in things’ but ‘in thought (Rν διανο�&)’[1027b26–7]. Despite this disqualification of being as truth, the final,tenth chapter of book Theta describes being as truth and falsity as τ�κυρι%τατα �ν [1051b1], being in the most proper sense. The Greeknoun κυρ�ω� or κυρ�ο� means the master, owner or possessor, and thusa book that is otherwise concerned with being as dunamis and energeiareaches its denouement in stating that truth is the master and mostproper sense of being.

The contradiction between book Epsilon and Zeta would appear tobe blatant. In holding that Aristotle locates the most primordialphenomenon of truth in the logos, in logic, modern commentatorshave proposed three different ways of abolishing or at least mitigatingthe contradiction: primarily, it has been argued that the chapter doesnot belong at all to book Theta, that it was not placed there byAristotle.26 In accepting that the chapter does belong to the book,Werner Jaeger has attempted, second, to interpret kuriotata as meaningnot the most proper but rather the most common. On this reading,being-true in the most common sense can be nothing other than thecopula and thus the chapter would simply revert to a discussion oftruth as the assertion.27 Third, Ross has finally resorted to bracketingthe words kuriotata on in the Greek, and omitting them from theOxford translation.28

On Heidegger’s reading, however, there is no contradiction in thepassage from books Epsilon to Theta because the modality of truth that



Aristotle excludes in the former is mere dianoetic truth, the truth ofassertions. Aristotle already gives an indication here that truth will bequestioned in another sense:

Concerning simples and essences (τn rπλd κα τn τ� Rστιν) there isnone (truth and falsity) in dianoia. The points that we must study inconnexion with being and non-being in this sense, we must considerlater [1027b28–30].

The passage is hardly pellucid but the noetic apprehension of the essenceor quiddity of a being is not a question of dianoia, and the inquiry willhave to return to the question of truth in the former sense.29

It is precisely to this question that Aristotle returns in Theta, 10, infirst of all distinguishing between the truth of assertions concerningwhat can at one moment be present in a being and at another momentabsent – the chair’s being red, for example – with the truth of incom-posite beings. Concerning the latter we read:

just as truth is not the same in these cases, so neither is being. Truthand falsity are as follows: contact and assertion are truth (for asser-tion is not the same as affirmation) and ignorance is non-contact.I say ignorance because it is impossible to be deceived with respect towhat a thing is except accidentally; and the same applies to incom-posite beingnesses (μy συνθ,τn� οSσ�α�) for it is impossible to bedeceived about them [1051b24–30].

By non-composite beings, then, Aristotle intends the ti estin, the what-being or essence of a thing. The truth of the apprehension of the essenceof beings is described as a θ�γ,ιν, a direct touching or contact, and as aφbναι, an asserting or saying, rather than an articulation of somethingas something within an affirmative or negative proposition. This directcontact is nothing other than the pure seeing of nous, since Aristotlegoes on to write that the aletheia of the non-composite occurs by way ofnoein [1052a1].

It has been argued that Aristotle here speaks, in a Platonic mode, ofsupra-sensible entities rather than of physical entities in their essence.Non-composite beings would mean pure forms or essences existingapart from, somewhere other than matter, and according to Owens,book Theta finishes in showing ‘that if immobile beings are admitted,they can be known only by simple contact’.30 The text, however, offersno grounds for admitting either that Aristotle is offering a hypothetical



discussion or that the discussion concerns simply or solely supra-sensibleentities. Aristotle speaks simply of the truth of the apprehension ofthe form or essence of a being, which essence book Theta has shown tobe more in being, as energeia, than possibility and matter. The passage,therefore, ‘simply’ concerns the truth of essence as such.

For Heidegger, according to the ‘guiding thread of uncovering (amLeitfaden von Entdeckung)’ this pure contact with the essence of beings is tobe understood as a ‘pure uncovering’ [G21 181], one that is prior to andmore primordial than apophantic truth. Thus as Being and Time declares:

Aristotle never defends the thesis that the primordial ‘locus’ of truthis in the judgement. […] And because Aristotle never upheld the the-sis we have mentioned, he was also never in a position to ‘broaden’the conception of truth in the λ�γο� to include pure νο,"ν. The truthof α$σθησι� and of the seeing of ‘ideas’ is the primordial kind ofuncovering. And only because ν�ησι� primarily uncovers, can theλ�γο� as διανο,"ν also have uncovering as its function [SZ 226].

In Aristotle’s work it is not the proposition that is the site of truth, butrather truth that is the site of the proposition. The original truth would,in fact, be the condition of the uncovering achieved by the proposition,since we can only say something about something if that thing has some-how already been disclosed to us. Now, in the ‘logic’ lecture course of1925–6, Heidegger attempts to develop this account of aesthetic truth inthe direction of the analysis of the hermeneutic ‘as’ and of Zuhandenheit,but, in the end, he does accept that an account of such an as-structure isnot to be found in Aristotle.31 It nevertheless remains the case that theStagirite locates a modality of truth that is not only prior to, but also thecondition of, the articulation of something as something in the assertion.It should be noted, in concluding this section, that Heidegger issues suchan argument directly against the interpretation advanced by FranzBrentano, who recognises the different senses of truth in Aristotle only tohold that the truth of the proposition is its most primordial modality.32

4.2 Truth and the phronetic moment

The first section of this chapter has shown the manner in whichHeidegger discovers in Aristotle’s work both an account of propositionaltruth as an uncovering of beings, and an account of noetic truth that is,in fact, the condition of the assertion. This leads, however, to a third andfinal question: does Aristotle offer a thinking that could relate to what



Heidegger terms the most primordial phenomenon of truth, namely thedisclosure of Dasein’s own being to itself? Such a question leads to theanalysis of phronesis or prudence in the Nicomachean Ethics, and leads usback to the questions of movement and time.

In the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics prudence is delineated asone of the modes of aletheuein, of revealing or being-in-the-truth, whichconstitute the intellectual or dianoetic virtues of the soul. Aristotle listsfive of these modes: techne, phronesis, episteme or scientific knowledge,sophia and nous. The fact that phronesis and techne, which relate tohuman action and production respectively, are delineated as modes ofrevealing or being in the truth shows that Aristotle in no way restrictstruth to a function of theoretical and scientific comportment. The firstfour of these modes of revealing all occur with and by means of logos,but in the second chapter of the book they are divided into two cate-gories that relate to two faculties, or even ‘parts’, of the soul: theRπιστημονικ�ν and the λογιστικ�ν, the ‘scientific’ and ‘deliberative’faculty.33 The former comprises episteme and sophia, the modalities ofknowing concerned with the permanent and unchanging, with the classof beings that cannot be ‘otherwise than they are (hλλω� Oχ,ιν)[1140a1]. The objects of episteme and sophia are ever-present but theobjects of phronesis and techne, on the contrary, are beings that canchange, that can, in other words, undergo movement. Nous, then, is notincluded in this division, but it is in fact present in all four modes ofknowing, since they are all forms of dia-noia.

Within each group Aristotle seeks to determine which is the highestmode of knowing, and prudence is asserted as being higher than techne.But how is techne a mode of revealing? Aristotle does not give an explicitresponse to this question in the Nicomachean Ethics, but in the 1920s,Heidegger points to the account that Metaphysics Zeta provides ofthe envisaging of the eidos in the soul within technical deliberation.34 Thealetheuein of techne is given in the letting-be-seen of the paradigm of thebeing that is to be produced, which paradigm would then be imposedon the work-material. Prudence, however, is concerned with actionrather than production and is higher than techne, since, as we saw in thesecond chapter of this book, ‘in the case of poiesis the telos is somethingother than it; but this does not hold for praxis; the acting well is itself thetelos’ [1140b6–7]. For Aristotle, technical production is always a means,a means towards an end, namely the finished product. The latter is alwaysfor someone or something, and thus the end of poiesis is other andexternal to the producer herself. Prudence, as a concern for acting well,however, is its own end.35



Prudence is still a form of deliberation and it does not exclude allreckoning concerning means and ends or what is conducive to theattainment of the end – τ� συμφNρον πρ�� τ� τNλο� [1142b33]. It is notdissimilar to techne insofar as it reasons as follows: if such and such is tohappen, say giving the right birthday gift to a friend, then this and thatmust be done. Yet, in prudence the human being discloses itself as itsown end insofar as it is concerned with ‘what is good for the humanbeing (τn iνθρ%πH dγαθb)’ [1140b7] and the ο9 ;ν,κα [1140b16], thefor-the-sake-of-which of our actions. The person who is prudent is theone who is able ‘to deliberate well about what is good and advantageousfor himself, and not merely in one specific way, for instance what isgood for his health or strength, but what is advantageous for the goodlife (,2 ξtν) as a whole’ [114025–7]. Prudence, thus, is a mode of reveal-ing that relates specifically to what is the good life for a person as bothan individual and a communal being.

In prudential deliberation the human being reveals or discloses itselfto itself as its own for-the-sake-of-which and as a being that can beotherwise than it is in its social praxis. Now in the essay of 1922,Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle, Heidegger arguesthat this determination of human being as what can be other than it is,although it implies an idea of movement, does not achieve a positivedetermination of the movedness of ‘factical life’, and that Aristotlearrives at such a ‘formal’ determination merely by means of a negation ofwhat is understood as authentic being, of being in the highest sense,namely immobility and eternity as permanent presence.36 Certainly, theidea of human being as a being in movement is not simply erroneous,but it is formal, that is, problematic, insofar as it does not adequately dis-tinguish human being from the being of the things of the world.Heidegger argues in addition that if Aristotle thinks the soul as thatwhich can undergo movement, then this movement is thought from theperspective of its end and fulfilment. For such a fulfilment would occurin what is, for Aristotle, the highest mode of revealing by means of whichthe soul contemplates the eternal, namely sophia. For Heidegger:

The being of life is seen as movement which transpires in its own self,and indeed the being of life is within this movement when humanlife has come to its end with respect to its ownmost possibility ofmovement, that is when human life has come to its end with respectto the possibility of the movement of pure beholding [PIA 43/383].

Heidegger’s reading seems to be based on, and confirmed by, the tenthbook of the Nicomachean Ethics, wherein perfect happiness – ,Sδαιμον�α – is



held to consist in the activity of the highest virtue, which is the highestprecisely because it contemplates the highest things, and ‘we oughtso far as possible to achieve immortality, and do all that man may tolive in accordance with that which is highest (τ� κρbτιστον) in him’[1177b32–4]. It is, then, such a conception of the becoming immortal ofthe human being by means of sophia that implies, for Heidegger, an ideaof the cessation of the particular movement of factical life itself.

On these grounds, the basic task of a phenomenological interpretationof Aristotle in 1922 consists, first, in asserting the primacy of prudenceas deliberation concerning the good in the given situation againstAristotle’s positing of sophia as the highest mode of revealing. Second,the interpretation must radicalise the idea of the being-moved of facticallife in its prudential concern for itself: Dasein must be shown to be notmerely a being that possesses the possibility of movement, but rather tobe one that is always and already ahead of itself in its concern for itselfand the things of the world. The ‘concrete interpretation’ of Aristotlemust show how factical life as the unity of its ‘not-yet’ and ‘already’ inthe presence of things is that which is, in fact, illuminated or disclosed inprudential insight. Beyond Aristotle’s merely formal characterisation ofhuman being, prudence must be interpreted as that by which Daseinapprehends itself authentically in its own proper movedness.

The additional moments of prudential insight delineated in the ninthChapter of Book VI are particularly significant for this reading. ForAristotle, the deliberative excellence constitutive of prudence is ‘insightas regards what is advantageous, arriving at the right conclusion on theright grounds at the right time (,ρθ�τη� J κατn τ� +φNλιμον, κα ο9δ," κα :� κα 3τ,’ [1142b28]. Prudence, then, discloses not only thefor-the-sake-of-which of an action in its concern for acting well, in itsconcern for the how of its action, but it also discloses the grounds uponwhich this action is to be undertaken, and the right time for the partic-ular action itself. The idea of the right time, the propitious moment for apossible human action is what Aristotle otherwise expresses with theterm καιρ��, as can be seen in the second book of the NicomacheanEthics.37 For the Heidegger of 1922, however, insofar as prudence con-sists in a disclosure of the end of the action, that is, the future, in addi-tion to the grounds of the action, that is, the past, the kairological momentis to be thought as a phenomenon of original temporality, and notmerely as the ‘now’ of the vulgar conception of time:

φρ�νησι� is the being of life in the temporalising illumination of itsdealings (mitzeitigende Umgangserhellung). The concrete interpretation



shows how this being, καιρ��, is constituted in φρ�νησι�. The practicaland solicitous conducting is always a concrete conducting in theHow of the concerned dealings with the world. φρ�νησι� makes thesituation of the one who performs the action accessible: in securingthe ο9 ;νεκα (the ‘Why’), in making available the particular towards-what-end, in apprehending the ‘Now’, and in sketching out the How[PIA 42/381].

On this account, the kairological moment of prudential insight wouldachieve an illumination or revelation of Dasein in its concern withthings in a given temporal situation. In this particular moment of truth,in effect, Dasein or ‘factical life’ would disclose itself to itself as its own‘already’ and ‘not-yet’ within a concrete situation.

In advancing this interpretation, Heidegger also takes up the analysisof the role of nous within prudence that is presented in Chapter 11 ofBook VI of the Nicomachean Ethics. The apprehension of the ‘ultimateand contingent (το8 Rσχbτου κα το8 Rνδ,χομNνου)’ [1143b3], theultimate and contingent particulars upon which practical deliberationand reasoning is based, is achieved by nous or aisthesis, terms whichAristotle uses here synonymously. Yet on Heidegger’s reading, prudence:

goes toward the Oσχατον, the extreme, in which the determinatelyseen concrete situation intensifies itself at the particular time. φρ�ν-ησι� is possible as a deliberation and solicitous comportment onlybecause it is primarily an α$σθησι�, an ultimate and simple overviewof the moment [PIA 42/381].

The disclosure of the given situation by means of prudence is a simpleseeing within which Dasein discloses itself to itself. Heidegger reads,therefore, the seeing of the Oσχατον as less a question of the apprehen-sion of particular things than of the disclosure of factical life to itself inits own particular temporal being-possible.

The disclosive insight proper to the prudential moment is, in otherwords, to be read as the Augenblick, the blink of an eye or the moment ofvision that is analysed in Being and Time.38 Now as I have indicated, fun-damental ontology distinguishes between two modes of the being ofDasein, namely its authentic and inauthentic existence, notwithstandingthe fact that ‘proximally and for the most part’ [SZ 42] Dasein exists in anaverage mode of being which is neither the one mode nor the other.Heidegger will develop this discourse of authenticity in the 1930s inspeaking no longer of modes of Dasein’s being, but of the essence of con-temporary man as subjectivity, and hence of the necessity of taking theleap into Dasein, of becoming Dasein itself.39 At any rate, Dasein’s falling



or inauthenticity, its tendency to understand itself in terms of the thingswith which it is concerned occurs by virtue of a mode of temporalisationthat is based upon the primacy of making-present. This primacy does notexclude having-been and being-futural since it is a mode of temporalisa-tion, but Dasein nevertheless loses or forgets itself as a thrown potentiality-for-being. The authentic modality of having-been occurs as repetition(Wiederholung), according to which Dasein assumes and takes up its pastexpressly as a source of possibility for its existence as a being-futural. Thepast, whether this be one’s own past or that of world history, is alwaysa task, and in repeating it Dasein becomes authentically what ‘it alreadywas’ [SZ 325]. The authentic modality of the future which repetitionitself implies consists in Dasein’s apprehension of the finitude of its owntemporal existence in the ‘anticipation (Vorlaufen)’ [SZ 336] of its mortal-ity and being-towards-death.

The unity of repetition and anticipation of one’s being-possible isconstituted in the moment of vision. In a narrow sense the moment canbe thought as the authentic modality of the ecstasis of the present. Yet,insofar as here Dasein’s mere making-present loses its self-sufficiencyand primacy with respect to the other ecstases of temporality, themoment is the event of Dasein’s appropriation of itself as futural and asa having-been. In the given situation Dasein pulls itself away from itsabsorption in and with the things of the world, and from its averageeveryday being-with-others; not, to be sure, in order to isolate itself fromthem, not in order to become an isolated subject, but, on the contrary,to disclose the proper scope, grounds and limits of a possible action in thegiven, temporal situation. The moment of vision allows Dasein todeliver itself authentically over to others and to the things of its concernin apprehending the most proper possibilities of its own being. Themoment of vision, then, is the unity of the authentic appropriation of thepresent, past and future, and in this way it is, in fact, predominantlyfutural. In authenticity the ‘ecstasis’ of the future takes precedence,since Dasein discloses itself to itself as a being that has its being to be.

It is in this sense that Heidegger seeks to interpret Aristotle’s analysisof phronesis in the early 1920s. For as forceful as this ‘ontologisation’40,to use Franco Volpi’s term, of phronesis may seem to be, Heidegger wouldseem never to retract it completely, not even in the lecture course of1927, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, within which he speaks ofthe naivety of Greek ontology:

Aristotle already saw the phenomenon of the instant, the καιρ��, andhe defined it in the sixth book of his Nicomachean Ethics; but […] hedid it in such a way that he failed to bring the specific time character



of the καιρ�� into connection with what he otherwise knows as time(ν8ν) [G24 409/288].

Although the term kairos does not appear in the sixth book of theNicomachean Ethics, the analysis of prudence would be nothing less thanan account of what kairos could mean. Yet it is, in the end, doubtfulwhether Aristotle adequately or properly comprehended the phenome-non of the Augenblick, since it does not lead him to bring into questionthe vulgar conception of time articulated in Physics IV.

It is manifestly the critique of Physics IV that Heidegger articulates in1927 that motivates the transformation of his more ‘generous’ repeti-tions of Aristotle’s determination of prudence. The critique of Physics IVleads Heidegger to perceive more acutely the force, the violence even, ofhis readings of the Nicomachean Ethics. It is possible, however, to move inthe opposite direction along this path cleared by Heidegger’s thinking. Itis possible to begin, as does Pierre Aubenque, in arguing that Aristotle, onthe basis of an account of ecstatic movement, provides an account of anecstatic time in the Physics, and then proceed to show how prudentialinsight occurs according to such an ecstatic time.41 In this sense onemight seek to underline, following Jacques Taminiaux, that ‘it is doubt-ful that Aristotle thought the time of πρdξι� could be characterised as“number of the before and after” ’.42 This is to say that it is perhapsdoubtful whether Aristotle himself thought that the physical determina-tion of time as the mere calculable duration of movement would be ade-quate to account for the temporal structure of prudential insight.

Nevertheless, the basis of Heidegger’s charge within the destruction of1927 is already to be found in the dismantling return of 1922. If there isan original thinking of the movedness and temporality of factical life tobe found in the analysis of prudence, then this analysis is betrayed byAristotle’s merely formal definition of the human being as a being thatcan be other than it is. Such a definition locates the human being as justanother being in time. This betrayal would only be confirmed by the basicconception of ousia as determining the being of all beings. In addition,it would be equally undermined by the analysis of sophia as implying, insome sense, a cessation of the movement of the soul, which analysis ispredicated upon an idea of the eternal and thus on an understanding ofbeing as constant presence. Yet, this betrayal, this philosophical naivetywould by no means preclude, as Heidegger remarks in 1928, an authen-ticity of action, an eigentliche Handlung [G26 236/183], in Greek praxisitself.



Part II

The Turn to the Work of Art


5Art and the Earth

It is not the opinion with which a thinker ends up that isdecisive, nor is it the framework within which he gives thisopinion. It is rather the movement of questioning, throughwhich alone truth comes into the open [S 128/106].

Part I of this book examined the manner in which fundamental ontologyappropriates and delimits Aristotle’s ontology. It undertook this in thesecond, third and fourth chapters according to the guiding thread of thethree aspects of the ‘ancient’, Aristotelian conception of being delineatedin the sixth paragraph of Being and Time, a paragraph that sketches thetask of ‘destroying the history of ontology’: being as being-produced,being as presence and being as truth. It is on the basis of having examinedfundamental ontology in this way that it is possible to turn to Heidegger’sreflection on the work of art in the 1930s and to the reading or rereadingof Aristotle that this reflection both articulates and implies. Such is theconcern of part II of this book. The present chapter seeks to trace themovement of Heidegger’s thinking in 1935–6, a movement that achievesa turn from fundamental ontology to ‘another thinking’, a different formof thought and questioning. The chapter does this, as noted in the intro-duction to the book, in paying particular attention to the different versionsof ‘The Origin’ that have been published. Although the final version of‘The Origin’ has itself been published in several editions, three distinctversions of the essay are available, which are referred to as follows:

1 UK3 The final version of the essay is based on the text of threelectures given in November and December of 1936 at the Freie DeutscheHochstift in Frankfurt am Main. In the Gesamtausgabe edition of Holzwege(G5) the text appears according to the modified version first published in

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1960 by Reclam, which included an appendix that Heidegger added in1956. The Gesamtausgabe edition also includes Heidegger’s own annota-tions to the text, which were written between 1960 and 1976.

2 UK2 A lecture that was delivered in November 1935 and repeated inJanuary 1936 under the title Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, ‘On theOrigin of the Work of Art’, which was published with a French transla-tion by Emmanuel Martineau, without the agreement of the Germancopyright holders and thus ‘privately’ by Authentica, Paris in 1987.

3 UK1 A first elaboration of the lecture, Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerkes:Erste Ausarbeitung, ‘On the Origin of the Work of Art’, that Heideggergave in November 1935, which appeared in Heidegger Studies (Duncker &Humboldt, Berlin, Vol. 5, 5–22) in 1989.

The present chapter focuses on the genesis of Heidegger’s thinking inthese three texts concerning the idea of earth (Erde), which is the funda-mental philosophical discovery of his reflection on art. The discovery ofearth occurs according to what one can term a second hylo-morphic repeti-tion, a second repetition of the concepts of matter and form. As a birthcertificate of the technical horizon constitutive of the Greek, Aristotelianinception of metaphysics, the first repetition sought to interpret the truthof matter and form in terms of the Zuhandenheit of equipment. The secondseeks not only to make manifest a horizon of world, but also to advancebeyond the idea of matter as such with a thinking of earth. Heidegger’sargument is that the artwork makes manifest a more profound origin ofboth the concepts of matter and form, namely earth and world.

In advancing this argument ‘The Origin’ attempts to establish a decisiveontological distinction between the artwork and the mere product, whichimplies a differentiation of creation, the creation of the work, fromprosaic production, the making of the mere product. Concomitantly,Heidegger seeks to bring to light a ‘remarkable fatality (merkwürdigesVerhängnis)’ constitutive of the history of philosophical reflection onart. This ‘came into being with the Greeks (Plato and Aristotle) with thecharacterisation of the artwork as a finished thing (angefertigtes Ding),that is, as a product (Zeugwerk)’ [UK2 52–3]. Greek ontology would thusinterpret what is ‘higher’, the artwork, from the perspective of what is‘lower’ [UK2 52–3], the mere product, insofar as it interprets the formeraccording to the concepts of matter and form. The fact that Aristotleincludes the examples of brass or wooden statues within his accounts ofpoiesis or technical production would only be the confirmation of anontological levelling that would find its origin in Plato. For Heidegger,



this original incapacity to apprehend the ontological specificity of thework of art would determine the entirety of the history of philosophicalreflection on art given that the schema of form–matter is ‘that which isused, in the greatest variety of ways, quite generally for all art theory andaesthetics’ [UK3 12/9]. The preceding two chapters of this study showedthat fundamental ontology sought to counteract a traditional tendencyto interpret human being in terms of the being of the things of theworld. Yet, at this point Heidegger’s destructive focus changes. The onto-logical levelling that he seeks to dismantle in 1935–6 concerns thereduction of the artwork to the status of the mere finished product. Ofcourse, in Greek ontology and throughout the philosophical tradition,the artwork is seen as something more than the mere product insofar asit is mimetic, symbolic or allegorical, insofar as it shows something otherthan itself and has an intellectual content. Nevertheless, to the extentthat both world and earth are passed over within traditional reflectionon the artwork, for Heidegger, it remains the case that what is proper toart has been lost and passed over, and consequently that art itself hasbeen impoverished.

The following and final chapter of this study will examine the delim-itation of Aristotle and the tradition of philosophical consideration ofart that issues from Heidegger’s thinking of world in art. The presentchapter, however, is divided into two main sections. The first deter-mines how earth is discovered through a reflection on both the recep-tion and creation of the artwork, and by means of a return to the ideaof phusis in pre-Socratic thought. With regard to the latter point, themanner in which Heidegger returns to Heraclitus’ fragments in order todelimit Aristotle’s hylo-morphism will be examined. In the second sec-tion of the chapter, however, I will show how this delimitationbecomes, in the end, a positive appropriation of Aristotle’s work. Forafter 1935–6 Heidegger goes on to interpret anew the very sense of thetechno-poetic horizon of Aristotle’s thinking. I will show, in fact, howHeidegger is led to revise the very sense of not only one, but all three ofthe aspects of the ‘ancient conception’ of being advanced in §6 of Beingand Time.

Heidegger’s reflection on the work of art, then, is a ‘work in progress’,one that even in the final version of ‘The Origin’ is on the way to trans-forming itself and to grasping fully its own implications. This dynamicconcerns not merely Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle, but also thevery attempt to distinguish the artwork from the mere product. It is to beremarked that in the first section of the final version of the essayHeidegger discusses three traditional determinations of beings that are

Art and the Earth 137


often interrelated in the history of philosophy: the thing as the unity ofsubstance and accidents, as a manifold of sensations and as formedmatter. The first and third of these determinations of beings derive, ofcourse, directly from Aristotle, but in discussing matter and form,Heidegger turns from an interpretation of the artwork in terms of worldand earth to a re-determination of the being of equipment in such terms,and this by means of reflection on a painting by Van Gogh. The two ear-lier versions of ‘The Origin’ allow us to recognise that this section is a lateaddition to the essay, and thus that it is a consequence of a reflection onthe artwork as such. Hence if traditional philosophical reflection on theartwork interprets what is higher from what is lower, then the movementof Heidegger’s thinking is, in fact, the inverse. In tracing this dynamicI will show that a genetic approach to ‘The Origin’ is a necessary precon-dition of an adequate understanding of the final version of the essay.

5.1 Art and the discovery of earth

Before examining the manner in which Heidegger’s phenomenologicalreflection on art achieves a discovery of earth, it is necessary to elucidatethe very sense of the title of the essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’,and the approach to the question of art that it implies. The word ‘origin’in the title could, of course, be taken to mean something like a cause,and thus the origin of the work of art would be the artist. The self-evidence of such a response finds itself immediately undermined by thefact that the artist is only what she is in relation to the works that shecreates. If the artist is the origin of the work of art then the latter is alsothe origin of the artist. We are, however, transported to another level ofenquiry in recognising that ‘artist and the work are in themselves and intheir reciprocity by a third, which is the first, that is that from which theartist and the work of art receive their name’ [UK3 1/1], namely art. Artis the origin of both the artist and the work, but this is an origin thatis not empirical or ontic but rather of the order of being itself. Art isthat which determines particular beings – work and artist – in theirbeing. In one sense of the genitive, therefore, the question of the originof the work of art is a question of art as an origin, of how art is and canbe the origin of work and artist. In the other sense of the genitive, how-ever, the question of the origin of the work of art is one of what theartwork can originate, what it can do, work or achieve. In incorporatingboth senses, the question of the origin of the work of art might otherwisebe formulated thus: What, or rather, how is art? The being or the ‘essenceof art (Wesen der Kunst)’ [UK3 2/2] itself, and not merely the essence of



the artwork, is at stake in this questioning. The form of the question isanalogous to Heidegger’s question concerning being insofar as the latterseeks not simply the being of beings, but rather the meaning, essenceor truth of being itself. Yet no simple analogy can be established here,since this reflection on the essence of art moves ‘along the path of thequestion of the essence of being’ [UK3 73/55]. Art and being, in otherwords, are not two separate terms between which we could establish arelation after the fact, as it were. Heidegger’s reflection on art, the poetic,is a reflection on the poetic in being.

Of course, art itself can be found only in or through both the artistand the work. In order to question the essence of art it is necessary tobegin with one or the other, with either the reception or creation of thework. Heidegger begins with the work’s reception since, as he argues, itis necessary to apprehend what the work of art is, or, better, what it does,what it works, in order to apprehend the specificity of artistic creation asdistinct from mere making. This approach gains additional justificationwith the argument that the work always has a priority and independ-ence in relation to the artist; the artist ‘remains something incon-sequential as compared with the work, almost like a passageway thatdestroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge’ [UK3 26/19].The work in its reception, in other words, will always tend to exceed theintentions of the artist and the extent to which it does this is, forHeidegger, a measure of its originality, its grandeur or greatness. Of course,if we are to begin with works of art in order to apprehend art itself, wehave engaged in a somewhat circular procedure. In referring to particu-lar works of art one has already presupposed what art is, given that sucha presupposition is the condition of saying that something is a work ofart. One falls, as it were, only deeper into this circle in focusing solely onthe highest possibilities of art, on original and thus ‘great art’ [UK326/19], as Heidegger does. Yet this is neither a ‘vicious’ circle nor one, aswith Hegel,1 that could receive a speculative resolution. It is rather whatHeidegger terms a hermeneutic circle: it is necessary to recognise that wehave an understanding, a pre-understanding of the essence of art, ofthat which determines the work as a work, and it is this pre-philosophicalunderstanding that constitutes the possibility of both the experience ofartworks and philosophical questioning of the essence of art itself. Farfrom being an impediment to a rigorous enquiry, this circle constitutesthe possibility of the enquiry itself. Consequently, the enquiry can nei-ther seek to avoid this circle, nor wonder how to enter into it – for it isalready in it – and it must rather attempt to find its way in the circleknowingly.



α – Earth and the reception of the work

In admitting that the appeal to particular works of art in order to deter-mine the essence of art has a circular structure, the only possible startingpoint is works of art that are ‘familiar to everyone’ [UK3 3/2], such asmonuments, churches and paintings. Yet, in Heidegger’s terms, if worksof art are considered in their ‘pure actuality (unangetastete Wirklichkeit)’ itseems as if they are ‘as naturally vorhanden’ [UK3 3/2] as other beings. Thepainting consists of paint on canvas, after all, and it hangs on the walllike the hat on a hook. Such a claim is as crude, given that it abstractsfrom what one has termed the aesthetic experience of the work, as it isobvious. Against the very idea of Zuhandenheit, the work of artannounces itself in its presence before the eyes. The fact of the being-thereof the artwork presents itself as such rather than effacing itself within anequipmental totality. Moreover, as Heidegger notes, the work has a ‘self-sufficiency [Insichselbststehen]’ [UK3 26/19] that is quite extraordinaryand which seems, first of all, to isolate it from all other beings.

It is by means of this phenomenological appeal to the self-sufficientpresence of the artwork that Heidegger discovers earth, but it has comeunder some scrutiny in recent commentary. Julian Young has argued that

the paradoxical fact of the matter is that Heidegger, in this passage ofthinking, has effectively lapsed into ‘aesthetics’, into insisting that theproper response to art requires the adoption of the ‘disinterested’,‘aesthetic attitude’. This fact alone should be sufficient to reveal theforgettable character of the entire passage.2

Heidegger’s simple recognition of the fact that we tend to look at orstare at works of art in their individuality becomes, according to Young’s‘reading’, a paradoxical reversion to ‘aesthetics’. Yet there is no paradoximplied here since staring at the work is not equivalent to, and by nomeans implies, the ‘disinterested’ attitude proper to aesthetics. More tothe point, in his Nietzsche Heidegger is concerned to correct misinter-pretations of the very sense of ‘disinterestedness’ in Kant’s aesthetics:the suspension of will is here no mere lack or indifference, but rather thehighest modality of human being.3

Putting forgettable ‘criticisms’ to one side, it is clear that the artworkshows itself in its seemingly self-sufficient presence. Yet in what doesthis presence consist? As Maurice Blanchot writes after Heidegger, the‘statue glorifies the marble’.4 The marble is glorified, which is to say thatits veins and lustre come to presence within the limits of the particular



configuration of the statue. In poetry, language does not simply effaceitself in delivering us over to that of which it speaks, but rather thetonality of the word is brought to resonate. In painting, the luminosityof the pigment arrests our attention. In the work of art, if it is original,what we call the ‘work-materials’ are brought to show themselves in aremarkable fashion. Moreover, to follow Heidegger’s evocation of a Greektemple,5 the temple-work can bring to presence not only the nature ofthe stone, but it can make manifest all that surrounds it:

Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This restingof the work draws up out of the rock the obscurity of that rock’sbulky yet spontaneous support. Standing there, the building holdsits ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes thestorm itself manifest itself in its violence. The luster and gleam of thestone, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun,first brings to radiance the light of the day, the breadth of the sky,the darkness of the night. The temple’s firm towering makes visiblethe invisible space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrastswith the surge of the surf, and its own repose brings out the ragingof the sea. Tree and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enterinto their distinctive shapes and thus come to appear as what theyare [UK3 28/21].

In its insistence on thinking what is verbally – the temple rests, holds itsground, makes the storm manifest, brings to radiance the light of dayand so on – this description recalls the account of a nature that would‘embrace’ us in Being and Time, and consequently, the attempt to deter-mine a Vorhandenheit that would not be a Dingvorhandenheit in §43 ofthe text of 1927. Here it is not, however, a question of nature as a par-ticular region of beings, of the natural being as opposed to the thingmade, but rather of an aspect of all beings, of the mineral, vegetal andanimal to follow the examples provided. The temple brings to presencenot only itself in its physicality but beings as a whole. The work allowsbeings to show themselves as what they authentically are, thus illumi-nating ‘that on which and in which man bases his dwelling’, which ‘wecall […] the earth’ [UK3 28/21].

On this account, earth is neither a particular region of beings nor,thought astronomically, a particular mass of matter. The artwork bringsitself and the beings which appear in its horizon to presence in theirphysicality, but it can achieve this only because being as such is given asan ‘emerging (hervorkommen)’ [UK3 32/24] and rising into presence, an



emerging which unfolds itself in an ‘inexhaustible variety of simplemodes and shapes’ [UK3 34/25]. Now although this emerging andcoming-to-presence would seem to be able to be located the mostdirectly in the generation of the natural being in the narrow sense – inthe blossoming of the tree, for example – it nevertheless constitutes, forHeidegger, the being of all beings. The being of beings is given as anemerging or coming into presence that is prior to and more primordialthan the movement or rest of beings in any traditional or Aristoteliansense of these terms. From the perspective of human being, this coming-to-presence is one that is granted to it, one that arrives for and before it.6

This coming-to-presence of beings is thought by Heidegger as a Wesen orWesung, an essencing or presencing that is more original than anyAnwesenheit or presence and that is irreducible to any comportment ofthe being that we are. Certainly, the ability to experience a work of art asmaking manifest the earth requires attention on our part and perhapseven a particular human faculty. Such a faculty integral to the experi-ence of art has been thought traditionally as the imagination. Yet anythinking of the imagination in art must begin with the originality of thework as making manifest earth, if we are to avoid reducing this original-ity to a merely subjective play of human faculties. This is why, althoughin a perhaps surprisingly hesitant manner, ‘The Origin’ brings into ques-tion the adequacy of the idea of the imagination for a thinking of art assuch [UK3 60/45].

The philosophical stakes of such a thinking of earth are brought intorelief in the most acute manner in comparing it to the traditional idea ofthe sensible, a comparison which Heidegger invites us to make in 1958:‘The earth: […] this term names everything which, visible, audible orpalpable, carries us and surround us, exalts and calms us: the sensible(Sinnliche)’ [G13 150/98]. Yet this is only a comparison; it is merely adelimitation of what a thinking of earth transcends. For the conceptionof earth is a transformation of what philosophy has thought as the sen-sible in opposition to the intelligible. Earth is not the mere inert matterof experience that would be ordered by and grounded in prior intelligi-ble, causal or transcendental conditions. It is to be thought verbally asan emerging through which beings as such are. Far from being a merematter lacking a form, earth is already the emerging of latent and presentfigures and shapes. In the end, earth is ‘equally sensible as non-sensible’[UK1 13], or as Heidegger will write later in the 1930s in the Contributionsto Philosophy, it is the more profound origin of what ‘metaphysics knowsas the sensible’ [G65 482/340]. I will return to this question, but in thepath of Heidegger’s thinking, then, a thinking of earth is what serves, at



least partially, to delimit the very idea of metaphysics as such. On thisaccount, metaphysics would be a particular, and historically situated,form of thinking concerning being that passes over earth.

It is possible to begin to comprehend why this thinking of earth is nei-ther an edifyingly imaginative projection of nature, nor the result of amere subjective aesthetic experience devoid of any ‘objectivity’, indetermining how this rising and emerging is, at one and the same time,self-secluding. The experience that we might have of the startling vivac-ity of the colour and tone of a painting, for example, is an experiencethat would seem to resist any scientific explanation. Yet rather thanbeing deprived of truth, for Heidegger this experience is precisely onethat makes manifest the truth of the physicality of things as such, as thatwhich is refractory to any scientific, calculative explanation.

Colour shines and wants only to shine. When we analyse it inrational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone. It shows itselfonly when it remains undisclosed and unexplained [UK3 33/25].

In order to explain the phenomenon of colour the scientist posits a trueworld beyond appearances, a world behind the scenes, in this case oneconsisting of wavelengths. Explanation here means to give an accountof something in terms of something else, namely its cause or ground.The scientist attempts to explain colour in positing a world of wave-lengths but what we perceive is not wavelengths, and in explainingcolour thus, colour itself has been passed over. Any such explanation ofwhat appears will transform it into something other than itself, losingthe phenomenon that it attempts to explain. In this connection, it isworthwhile to return to §69 of Being and Time: if the modern mathe-matical projection of nature establishes an a priori framework of a quan-titatively determinable space, time and motion, this projection, far fromestablishing the truth of beings, only passes over the primordial truth ofbeing as an emerging that refuses to give over its own secret. Earth isthat which is forever closed to the sciences, whether physical, chemicalor biological, and it is neither simply a ground, nor a Boden, a basis, if bysuch a term we mean a being. It is rather an ‘abyss (Abgrund)’ [UK1 11].Earth is an ‘emerging that is a self-secluding (das Hervorkommende-Bergende)’ [UK3 32], an emerging that hides itself, that maintains its ownabsence. Earth, in fact, is refractory not only to the methods of modernscience but, more generally, to any calculative thinking. The burden ofthe weight of a stone, to follow Heidegger’s example, is something otherthan a calculated weight. The heaviness of the stone that might be



perceived in the temple, or more prosaically, the heaviness of the rucksackthat feels light at the beginning of the journey, heavy at the end, is notitself a number or a scale of measure, however exact the latter may be.A simple calculation of the heaviness of something has transformed thisheaviness into a weight. Heaviness itself is encountered only within theorder of experience, which is prior to any numerical calculation, and itrefuses to reveal itself to such calculation. Thus: ‘Earth shatters everyattempt to penetrate it’ [UK3 33/25].

β – Phusis and the fall of philosophy

This discovery of earth occurs as at once a retrieval of the conception ofphusis to be found in pre-Socratic thought and in Heraclitus’ thinking inparticular. As ‘The Origin’ argues: ‘the Greeks early called this emergingand rising in itself and in all things φjσι�’ [UK3 28/21]. Heidegger inter-prets quite literally the famous fragment 123 of Heraclitus: φjσι�κρjπτ,σθαι φιλ,", ‘nature’ loves to hide herself.7 Phusis is here spokenof verbally, as what likes or loves to hide itself, but this is not to bethought as a merely occasional discretion. This is why Heidegger trans-lates philein in this context as a ‘granting’, giving or ‘favour (Gunst)’.8

Phusis is a granting which nevertheless withholds itself, which main-tains itself in hiddenness. Concerning the noun itself, if as a verb φjωmeans to grow, to put, come or bring forth, to produce in the widest ofsenses, then this does not mean that phusis denominates a particularregion of beings. As Heidegger argues in the lecture course of 1935 enti-tled Introduction to Metaphysics, it denominates the emerging, the eventof presence by which beings as such are

This emerging and this standing-out-in-and-from-itself must not beconsidered as one process amongst others that we can observe inbeings. Φjσι� is being itself, thanks to which beings first of allbecome and remain observable. The Greeks did not first experiencewhat φjσι� is from natural processes, but rather inversely: it is on thebasis of a poetic and meditative (dichtend-denkenden) project of thefundamental experience of being, that what they had to call φjσι�opened itself to them [EM 11].

Heidegger thus attempts to retrieve a meaning of phusis that is priorboth to its Platonic and Aristotelian sense9 as denominating the essen-tial nature, ground or what-being of a being and to its more narrowAristotelian sense as denominating a region of beings, the being of thosebeings which have the principle of their movement in themselves. Our



attention is drawn to the etymological proximity, the shared stem, ofφjσι� and φa�, φbο� – light; as light phusis is presence, the event ofpresence which allows each and every being to show itself in its ownparticular shape and figure. On Heidegger’s reading this is why Heraclitusthinks beings as fire. Fire here is not to be thought, as Aristotle wouldhave it in accounting for the thought of his predecessors, as an elementor material ‘substrate’.10 It is rather to be thought as one of the essentialtraits or determinations of phusis as an emerging into presence alongwith the Oν πbντα, the one in or of the all, and the rρμονgη iφανy�, theinvisible harmony by which beings are.11

Heidegger does not, strictly speaking, identify a thinking of earthwith the early Greek thinking of phusis. ‘The Origin’ states only that theemerging into presence, rather than the emerging and concealing ofbeing, is what the Greeks called phusis. The problem here is one ofwhether the concealing germane to phusis was ever properly meditatedby the early Greeks themselves. For if Heraclitus experiences and thinkssuch concealing, then it is nevertheless soon eclipsed with the adventof Plato’s philosophy. According to the Introduction to Metaphysics thishistorical event constitutes nothing less than a ‘decline (Abfall)’[EM 141] of philosophy, the beginning of the end of Greek thought. Toa certain extent Plato’s thinking can, in fact, be seen as something likethe fulfilment of the early thinking of phusis. The fact that beings cometo presence as the sort of beings that they are is a truth that only ren-ders more precise, that specifies, as it were, phusis. Yet if the aspect of abeing is that by which it presents itself, this presencing is no longerthought as such but only in terms of its result, namely presence, constantpresence. This no longer is what would enable the Platonic separation ofthe aspect of beings from beings themselves. As Heidegger argues: ‘it isbecause being is the presence of what is constant in unhiddenness thatPlato can interpret being, οSσgα (beingness), as 1δNα’ [NII 217/N4 162].Instead of being thought verbally as a presencing that maintains itsown absence, being is now thought as constant presence, and it is pre-cisely the aspect or eidos of beings that is constantly in presence. It is,therefore, the loss of phusis as an unconcealing–concealing with Plato’seidetic determination of being that would set in motion the decline ofphilosophy. Now although Heidegger attempts to retain the word ‘phi-losophy’ itself for a thinking of being all the way through the 1930s,given that philosophy, properly so called, begins with Plato, Heideggerwill, in effect, argue that this decline is not a mere accident that befallsphilosophy, but rather the fall is nothing less than the historical adventof philosophy as such.



γ – Earth and creation: the problem of genius

The greatest artist does not have any concept that a single pieceof marble does not itself contain within its excess, althoughonly a hand that obeys the intellect can discover it.

Michelangelo12

The artwork has the capacity to bring the physicality of beings to pres-ence as what will always exceed our calculative attempts to grasp it. InHeidegger’s terms the work sets-up or pro-duces (stellt her) the earth. Inits reception, then, the work itself is productive. This productive capacityof the work is, of course, in some sense dependent on, a consequence of,the process of production carried out by the artist. As I have alreadynoted, Heidegger deliberately focuses first on the reception of the work,and the first version of ‘The Origin’ does not, in fact, offer a positivethinking of artistic creation. Such a conception of creation as opposed tomere making is articulated, in a first movement, with the claim thatalthough the artist uses what are termed materials – marble, stone, paint –these are not used up, but rather brought forth to stand in their pres-ence. Rather than being produced in order to serve a purpose within ahorizon of finality, the work of art is brought forth to stand for itself inits irreducible individuality and self-sufficiency. The work, thus, allowsthe earth to show itself in a particular configuration and the artist ‘doesnot use up or misuse the earth as matter, but rather sets it free to benothing but itself’ [UK3 52/38–9]. On this account, creation wouldallow earth to show itself as such, whereas the result of mere makingwould present it in the guise of mere useful matter.

More radically, however, creation is distinguished from prosaic pro-duction not only according to its end, but also according to its means.Creation is thought according to the verb schöpfen, which means to‘draw from’, in the sense that ‘one draws water from a well’ [UK3 63].Certainly, in the words of Aristotle’s Physics, the artist produces a figurewhich nature alone could not produce [198b17], yet this figure is notsimply imposed on the earth from the outside. In this connection, ‘TheOrigin’ takes up the dictum of the German Renaissance artist and art-theorist Albrecht Dürer, according to which ‘in truth, art lies hiddenwithin nature; he who can wrest (reißen) it from her, has it’.13 ForHeidegger, the verb wrest or reißen here means ‘to draw out the sketchand to draw the design with the drawing-pen on the drawing-board(Reißen heißt hier Herausholen des Rißes und den Riß reißen mit der Reißfederauf dem Reißbrett) [UK3 58/43]. The figure or form of the work is drawnfrom the ‘materials’, which is to say, first of all, that the vision or knowing



peculiar to creation cannot be understood as simply the envisaging, inabstraction from the materials themselves, of an idea, or a plan of thework to be produced that would then be superimposed on, as is said, araw material. It consists much more in the capacity to apprehend whatis possible for the ‘material’ with which one is working; it consists in thecapacity to apprehend the possibility of, for example, the statue in thestone, to apprehend what figure the stone itself is apt for or capable of.In this sense the drawing up of the design of that which is to be createdis a drawing from the earth. Consequently, the process of creation is, infact, less ‘creative’14 than it is revelatory, and in realising the design withthe work-material the artist does more or perhaps less than act on aninert matter. In ‘wresting’ the figure from ‘nature’ she rather lets theearth come to presence in a definite figure, she brings this figure itselfinto presence. The craft aspect of creation contains an essential passiv-ity, and as a bringing-forth it is rather ‘a receiving and extracting(Entnehmen) within the relation (Bezug) to unconcealment’ [UK3 50/37].Heidegger does, however, qualify Dürer’s dictum in stressing the origi-nality of the work: if it is true that there is ‘a capacity for bringing forth(Hervorbringenkönnen) that is art’ hidden in nature, then ‘it is equally cer-tain that this art hidden in nature becomes manifest first through thework, because it lies originally in the work’ [UK3 58/43]. The block ofstone constitutes the possibility of the statue, certainly, and yet it is thework of art alone that makes manifest what the stone is capable of, whattrait or figure the stone can possibly bear. The second section of thischapter will return to this question, but this minimal qualification ofDürer’s dictum amounts to nothing more than a reiteration of Aristotle’srecognition that one cannot simply assert the priority of the possibilityof a work in relation to its actuality.

Robert Bernasconi has suggested that Heidegger takes Dürer’s dictumout of context in interpreting it according to the idea of ‘extraction’, andthat it is concerned only with the question of artistic fidelity to nature,the careful observation of nature in the artistic imitation of its forms.15

Although this is not an impossible reading, it loses much of its forceupon the recognition that with such an interpretation Heidegger returnsto what the art-theorist and historian Erwin Panofsky has characterisedas a ‘commonplace’16 in Renaissance ‘art-theory’, namely the idea thatthe work is hidden in the work-material before being unearthed in theprocess of creation. Michelangelo writes:

Just as all styles sleep in the pen and ink:the low, the mediocre and the sublime,



and in the marble every image, noble or vile,according to what our genius (ingegno) can extract from it,thus, my dear lord, your breast containsas much pride, perhaps, as humility.17

Not only is the statue dormant in the marble but also the style of thewriter is hidden in the pen and ink. This second example may be moredifficult for us to envisage but on this account the artist only extracts or,better, awakens the latent, dormant possibilities of stone and ink, thepossibilities that nature herself already holds.

It is necessary to note that the ‘common-place’ Renaissance concep-tion of creation articulated in this poem involves a quite particular, pre-modern thinking of genius. Within a study of the emergence anddevelopment of the concept of genius, the historian of ideas Edgar Zilselhas shown how the modern conception of it as an innate, exceptionaland irrational – since it cannot be learnt – talent for art has its immedi-ate origin in the ingenum of the Renaissance. The Latin ingenum orItalian ingegno

qualifies either a person or an individual trait, sometimes without adefinite valorisation, but which, without the addition of a specificqualification, signifies an uncommon talent or a remarkably giftedperson. Etymologically, it concerns an innate quality that is opposedto all that can be learnt or reproduced.18

The Renaissance conception of ingenum as designating an innate qualitywas quite unknown in the middle Ages, and it registers what one candescribe as a certain discovery of individuality.19 Yet if the ingenum of theRenaissance will become the genius of the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, becoming finally a gift peculiar to the fine artist, then beforebeing reduced singularly and solely to a particular capacity of a subjectopposed to the sheer materiality of its objects, for Michelangelo at least,the ingenum of the artist is a capacity that consists in being able torespond to or awaken the capacity of nature that is equal to, if notgreater than, the ingenum of the artist herself.

We have not yet arrived, as Heidegger writes, at ‘modern subjectivism’,which ‘immediately misinterprets creation, taking it as the sovereignsubject’s performance of genius ( geniale Leistung des selbstherrlichenSubjektes)’ [UK3 64/48]. Such a formulation of the problem of genius is,without doubt, forceful. One wonders how a sovereign subject couldperform an act of genius, since genius in Kant, for example, is that over



which a subject has no control, something that exceeds the intentionsand agency of the artist. In fact, if reference is made to Kant in this con-nection, it is necessary to note that his account of genius in the Critiqueof the Power of Judgment carries a certain ambiguity, one that could, infact, be understood to point back to the Renaissance conception of cre-ation. As Kant writes in an Aristotelian mode, ‘we recognise’ an art inthe most general sense ‘in everything formed in such a way that its actu-ality must have been preceded by a representation of the thing in itscause’.20 The ‘producing cause’, namely the producer, must have ‘an endin view to which the object owes its form’.21 The purpose that the table,for example, is to serve determines its form and the work-materials to beformed. In this way what is to be produced is ‘represented as possible’22

in the producer’s mind, whereas the production proper makes this rep-resentation actual. The representation, however, is arrived at accordingto a process of rational, conceptual deliberation and according to ‘rules’;in order to produce a table, one must select an appropriate material, thetable itself must have a certain form, the leg or legs must be joined to thetop of the table in a certain way and so on. These rules can be learnt andapplied to each particular case of the production of a table. Fine art,however, cannot be understood to be merely the result of the applica-tion of such rules, since

the author of a product that he owes to his genius does not knowhimself how the ideas for it come to him, and also does not have it inhis power to think up such things at will or methodically and to com-municate to others precepts that would put them in a position to pro-duce similar products.

The aesthetic ideas expressed by a work of art, ideas that – as will be elu-cidated more fully in the following chapter – animate it as a work of soul,spirit or Geist and thus as a work of fine art, are beyond method. The abil-ity to think them up is a talent and not an aptitude, which is to say thatit can neither be learnt nor taught, and that it cannot be reduced to amere function of the will.

To this extent, Kant’s analysis of the creation of fine art remains quitefaithful to Plato’s account of lyric poetry in the Ion as deriving not fromtechne, which is knowledge, and more specifically, the knowledge andvision germane to production, but rather from a divine power or capac-ity, a θ,gα δjναμ,ι (533d), which possesses the poet, and consequentlythose that hear or read his words, by means of a kind of magnetic force.Yet instead of being of divine inspiration the power that exceeds



rational, conceptual thought for Kant is ‘an innate productive faculty ofthe artist’, albeit one that is a ‘natural gift’, a talent ‘which itself belongsto nature’. Given, therefore, that fine art supposes rules, for otherwise itwould not be an art, it is, famously, nature that gives the rule in thecreation of fine art by means of genius.

Although genius is innate to the artist, then, it is nevertheless natureherself that would be operative or active within artistic creation; it isnature that gives the rule to art. As I suggested, in its ambiguity such athinking of nature in art may seem to recall the Renaissance conceptionof creation. Yet Kant provides us with no means to think nature in thesense that Heidegger, after Dürer and Michelangelo, intends. Such a con-ception is, in the end, impossible for Kant precisely to the extent thatwithin his account of art in general possibility is thought from its logi-cal determination as a mere category of modality, as solely concerningthe representation of the thing in the producer’s mind before its actual-isation. In other words, if the fine artist ‘does not know how the ideas forit have entered into his head’, then the determination of how theseideas get out of the artists head, which means the account of the physi-cal process of production as creation, is left quite unaffected. Hence ifHeidegger’s formulation of the problem of genius is somewhat forceful,then arguing, following Jay Bernstein, that it ‘is precisely because worksof genius are not the products of a sovereign subjectivity, and becausetheir excess beyond subjectivity entails a transcendental opacity’ thatKant’s account of genius can be brought into ‘direct affiliation’23 withHeidegger’s thinking, does not do any justice to the force of this formu-lation itself. It is the discovery of earth as something other than mereinert and transcendentally grounded matter that ultimately legitimatesthe argument and which decisively separates Heidegger’s thinking frommodern subjectivism. The discovery of earth leads us to apprehend acapacity of nature herself within creation, a capacity that does not residein the sphere of a subject opposed to its objects. Moreover, it is necessaryto note that the ambiguity of Kant’s account of nature in art will soon bedissipated in Hegel’s account of the ‘technical skill’ required by artisticcreation: the artist must have ‘subdued the sensuous material to willingobedience’. Mere sensuous and ultimately dead matter must ‘immedi-ately obey the artist’s intentions’; it must be mastered by the will and lifeof spirit.24

It is, then, in thinking beyond modern conceptions of genius thatHeidegger seeks to distinguish both artistic vision and the craft aspect ofcreation from prosaic production. The second version of the essayannounces such a distinction in terms of the being-produced (Erzeugtsein)



of the work being hidden (verhüllt) by and taken over by its being-created[UK2 50]. Creation would exceed mere prosaic production in bringingforth a being that sets-up earth. Despite the fact that Heidegger alreadyrefers to Dürer’s dictum, the second version thus does not yet dissociatecreation and mere making as being of entirely different orders. It ends,however, by asserting the necessity of a ‘correct concept of equipmentand a correct concept of the art work’ and by stating that ‘a delimitationof the work of art in relation to equipment is of a principal significancefor a correct understanding of art itself’ [UK2 50–2]. In taking up thisproblem, and notwithstanding the fact that Heidegger stresses the diffi-culty of clearly establishing such a distinction [UK3 46/34], the finalversion argues that creation and mere making are indeed of altogetherdifferent orders. Of course, art requires a certain craftsmanship but theidea that craftsmanship is the same in both creation and mere making isnothing but an ‘illusion’ [UK3 52/39]. The craftsmanship required forthe creative manipulation of paint or stone in creation is of another‘sort’ [UK3 47/35] than mere making. Creation, thus, would differ frommere making because earth differs from matter, from the ‘using up andmisuse’ of earth as matter. In fact, if the very idea of matter derives fromthe work-materials encountered in the process of prosaic productionthen what has come to be termed the materials of artistic creation is inno way mere materials; ‘nowhere in the work does there exist somethinglike a work-material (Überall west im Werk nichts von einem Werkstoff )’[UK3 34/25]. To abstract from the different historical determinations of‘matter’ – as will become clear shortly, such an abstraction lies at the heartof the problem of Heidegger’s readings of Aristotle’s hylo-morphism –what we ‘misinterpret as matter’ [UK2 32] harbours a more profoundsecret, namely earth.

5.2 Fundamental ontology in question

α – The shoes and the origin of Zuhandenheit

The discovery of the more profound origin of the concept of matter inthe artwork inexorably leads to the following questions in relation toequipment or the product: Why is it necessary to say, as Heidegger doesinitially, that the production of the product constitutes a ‘misuse of theearth as mere matter’, and not a bringing-forth of the earth? And is itnot possible to encounter a more profound origin of the concepts ofboth matter and form in the use of equipment?

Heidegger responds specifically to the latter question in the first sec-tion of the third and final version of ‘The Origin’. For the attempt is



made here to locate a more profound origin of the referentiality ofequipment, a more profound origin of Zuhandenheit. Initially, Heideggerreiterates the analysis of Zuhandenheit in relation to what is now a three-fold distinction between the artwork, the product and the mere thing. Ifthe conceptual doublet of matter and form is not proper to the artwork,then neither is it proper to the ‘mere thing’, which means ‘lifeless beingsof nature’ such as ‘a stone, a clod of earth, a stick of wood’ [UK3 6/5]. Inthis connection, Aristotle writes in Metaphysics Z:

Evidently even of the things ordinarily considered to be beingness,most are only potencies thereto – both the parts of animals (for noneof them has being separately; when they have been separated, thentoo they all have being merely as matter) and earth and fire; for noneof them is a unity, but as it were a mere heap till they are worked upand something unitary is made out of them [1040b5–10].

Elements such as fire and earth are not yet things or beings in the propersense, because they have not yet come to adopt the stability of a distinctform. Certainly, a mass of granite already has a sort of form or shape. Yetthe definite form of the product is determined by the use that the beingis to serve rather than a haphazard and ‘prior distribution of the matter’[UK3 13/9]. To paraphrase Kant, the ‘producing cause’ of the producthad an end in view to which the product owes not only its form, butalso the particular material from which it is made. This would mean, forHeidegger, that the concepts of matter and form first originate from aninterpretation of equipment, of that which is useful. On Heidegger’saccount, however, the utility of the product is not to be thought assomething that ‘hovers somewhere above it as an end (was als Zweckirgendwo darüber schwebt)’ [UK3 13/10], but rather as something thatdetermines the being of the product as zuhanden.

In order to apprehend more profoundly what the ‘equipmental beingof equipment in truth is’, however, Heidegger selects the example of apair of shoes, shoes belonging to a peasant woman:

When she takes off her shoes late in the evening, in deep but healthyfatigue, and reaches out for them again in the still dim dawn, orpasses them by on the day of rest, she knows all this without noticingor reflecting. The equipmental being of the equipment consists indeedin its usefulness. But this usefulness rests in the abundance of an essen-tial being of the equipment. We call it reliability (Verlässlichkeit). Byvirtue of this reliability the peasant woman is made privy to the silent



call of the earth; by virtue of the reliability of the equipment she issure (gewiß) of her world [UK3 19–20/14].

The example of the shoes differs from the paradigmatic status in Beingand Time of the item of equipment that is manipulated, the tool orWerkzeug in the narrow sense, in two ways: shoes are not only, properlyspeaking, worn rather than used but they are also worn, needless to say,on the feet rather than on the hand. Certainly, Heidegger had alreadyreferred to shoes in the account of Zuhandenheit in Being and Time. Yet ifthis reference to shoes did not interrupt this account in any way, thenHeidegger now seeks to show that in the fact of their being worn, theshoes have a being that is prior to any utility or usefulness. The shoesare, of course, produced for something, namely for walking and toprotect the feet. On the ground, however, or in the field – the two phrasesare to be understood both literally and metaphorically – and before thepeasant might take them to the cobbler, the shoes have a reliabilitywhich is prior not only to their presence before the eyes or Vorhandenheitbut also to their Zuhandenheit. Heidegger seeks to show that it is byvirtue of the reliability of a pair of shoes – if they are in good state ofrepair – and only by virtue of this reliability that the peasant can haveparticular projects to pursue. The reliability of equipment is the priorcondition of its utility and the ‘latter vibrates in the former’; it ‘would benothing without it’ and is its ‘essential consequence’ [UK3 20/15]. Theconception of the tool as zuhanden, as appearing within a horizon offinality, then, is still too immediate and the discovery of earth has led tothe recognition that the being of equipment is given at a more profoundor a lower level – the spatial metaphor is here quite appropriate giventhe example of the shoes – than that of utility or handiness. In the field,the reliability of the shoes is taken for granted, yet what is in factgranted in this taking for granted is world and earth. Thanks to thesolidity of the shoes the peasant woman is open to the ‘silent call’ ofthe earth, and she is ‘certain’ of her world. This is to say that our practicalcomportment is founded on an understanding or a knowing, but suchknowing is prior to the in-order-to of our everyday projects.

Heidegger defends this account of equipment in transforming theargument of §16 of Being and Time concerning the breakdown of equip-ment. There it was argued that at the moment of the breakdown of anitem of equipment the horizon of references that constitute a totality ofequipment is, in a certain manner, revealed. In the no-longer-being-able-to-be-used-for-something of an item of equipment there occurs a ruptureof its referentiality to other items of equipment. For the genealogical



gaze of the phenomenologist at least, at the moment of this rupturethere is a manifestation of the fact that in its use this item of equipmentwas referred pre-thematically to other items of equipment within anequipmental totality. Now, however, Heidegger argues that the specificmanifestation of the utility or usefulness of the broken-down or worn-out product in its no-longer-being-able-to-be-used-for-something isevidence of the original reliability of equipment; ‘Such dwindling ofequipmental being is the disappearance of its reliability. Such dwin-dling, which gives things of use that boringly oppressive usualness, isonly one more testament to the original nature of equipmental being’[UK3 20/15].

This is a difficult argument. If the argument of Being and Time couldbe easily defended, then the claim that the manifestation of utility inthe broken-down tool is evidence of an equipmental being more funda-mental than utility itself is problematic. For what is supposedly madeevident here does not show itself in the same manner as its utility. Itdoes not show itself at all. Heidegger recognises this since he introducesthe idea of reliability in the final version of ‘The Origin’ by way, in fact,of a painting of Van Gogh. It is, for Heidegger, only through this paint-ing that we can learn to see reliability; ‘the equipmentality of equipmentfirst expressly comes to the fore through the work and only in the work’[UK3 21/16]. On the basis of our study of the movement of Heidegger’sthinking, however, it is clear that the account of reliability emerges lessfrom an epiphanic interpretation of a particular painting than it doesfrom the discovery of the earth. In other words, Heidegger refers to apainting in order to articulate a thesis whose necessity results from thediscovery of earth achieved by means of a reflection on art.

This movement is by no means explicitly articulated in the text andthe fact that Heidegger turns to the painting as a ‘pictorial representa-tion (bildliche Darstellung)’ of a pair of shoes upon stating the necessityof a description of equipment ‘without any philosophical theory’ [UK318/13] can be considered as disingenuous. But what is Heidegger doinghere? To abstract from his somewhat overcharged, if not ‘pathetic’,25

manner of articulating the problem, Heidegger invites the reader to seein a painting a thesis of which the sense and necessity will become clearin the course of the text. The painting allows him, in fact, at once toadvance a thesis concerning the being of equipment, and to surpass,from the outset, any idea of the artwork as a mere representation ofthings. Rather than representing something, the painting manifestsbeings – in this case shoes – in their being. Of course, one is in no waycompelled to accept this reading of a painting, and the fact that the



latter is not even named or specified in ‘The Origin’ is enough to indi-cate that this is hardly Heidegger’s primary concern. Yet even if onechooses not to accept this reading, this, in the end, takes nothing awayfrom its possibility as a ‘reading’ of a painting.

It is, in any event, this more original thinking of equipmentality thatliberates the ‘mere thing’ from its determination as the always andalready zuhanden in Being and Time. As we read, the ‘equipmental char-acter of equipment keeps gathered within itself all things according totheir manner and extent’ [UK3 20/15], but this gathering must bethought more originally than as a horizon of referentiality. For Heidegger,‘anticipating a meaningful and weighty interpretation of the thinglycharacter of the thing, we must aim at the thing’s belonging to theearth’ [UK3 57/43]. We must aim at the thing’s belonging to the earthrather than saying that it is the earth, because the thing appears in aworld, and because world and earth are not themselves things, but twoontological differentials, two aspects of the being of beings.

It is a result of a reflection on the work of art, then, that Heidegger is ledto think beyond both the concepts of Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit.Philosophical reflection, as he writes in 1936 with specific reference toSchelling, but in terms that describe the dynamic of his own thinking,‘must guard itself from making the Vorhandensein or Zuhandensein ofthings the first and sole measure of the determination of being’ [S137/114]. As significant as it is, however, this thinking of equipmentbeyond Zuhandenheit is to a certain extent still quite negative insofar,precisely, as it merely seeks to think beyond Zuhandenheit. It is for thisreason that Heidegger will always point to the thinking of ‘The Thing’ inthe eponymous essay of 1950 in terms of the fourfold of ‘world’, ‘earth’,‘sky’ and ‘mortals’ as his most decisive.26

β – Techne and poiesis revisited

We are still far from pondering the essence of action (das Wesendes Handelns) decisively enough. We view action only as caus-ing an effect. The actuality of an effect is valued according to itsutility. But the essence of action is accomplishment. To accom-plish means to unfold something into the fullness of itsessence, to lead it forth into this fullness – producere. ‘Letter onHumanism’ [G9 313/239].

Examining how the being of equipment in its use is re-determined interms of earth leads us to the question of the production of equipment: isit not possible to see in prosaic production a bringing-forth of the earthrather than a mere misuse of earth as matter? Although the third section



of the final version of ‘The Origin’ aims to establish a decisive distinctionbetween production and creation, a remark in the second section bringssuch decisiveness into question. Heidegger writes here that ‘nowhere inthe work is there any trace of a work-material’, but he adds immediatelyafterwards that ‘it even remains doubtful whether, in the essential defini-tion of equipment, what equipment consists of is properly described in itsequipmental essence as matter’ [UK3 34/25]. On this evidence, it wouldseem clear that the third section of the final version of the essay was writ-ten before the first and second sections. Yet the distinction between pro-duction and creation is rendered problematic in the manner in which it isarticulated in relation to Greek thinking in the final section itself.Heidegger first of all stresses that if the Greeks understand both mere mak-ing and artistic creation as techne, before signifying a practical activity, theterm properly designates a mode of knowing. He argues consequently:

The artist is a τ,χνgτη�, not because he is also a craftsman, butbecause both the setting forth of works and the setting forth of equip-ment occur in a bringing forth [Her-vor-bringen] that causes beings inthe first place to come forward and be present in assuming an out-ward aspect. Yet all this happens in the midst of the being that surgesupward, growing of its own accord, phusis. Calling art τNχνη does notat all imply that the artist’s action [das Tun] is seen in the light ofcraft. What looks like craft in the creation of a work is of a differentsort [UK3 47/35].

Both the artist and the craftsman were men of techne, but the latter is amode of knowing, which, as the condition of any process of production,perceives and draws from phusis a possible outward aspect into theunhidden. In stressing, thus, the priority and originality of techne inrelation, in effect, to poiesis, the text aims to safeguard – in a quite nega-tive way – the distinction between two modes of craftsmanship; thecraft aspect proper to creation ‘is of a different sort’. And yet the termsof the argument itself, far from supporting a distinction between twomodes of craftsmanship, would seem to undermine the very intentionof the argument itself. For if the Greeks thought techne in general, whichis proper to both modes of production, as a bringing-forth into unhid-denness, then the craft aspect of prosaic production in the Greek senseof poiesis can hardly be held to be a mere manipulation of inert matter.27

This reading of techne as a bringing-forth of phusis is predicated uponan interpretative return to a pre-Socratic sense of the term, as evidencedin the reading of Sophocles’ Antigone in Introduction to Metaphysics.



Techne is here read as an Ins-Werk-setzen-können des Seins, ‘the possibilityof the setting of being into work’ [EM 122] in a particular being, namelyin a work. The genitive here is at once subjective and objective, which isto say that being is at once the ‘subject’ and the ‘object’ of the settinginto work. Techne, in other words, is not simply opposed to phusis, andlike world and earth the two are ontological differentials. The two sharea common ‘ground’ in being, which ground Heidegger thinks in 1935 asforce or even violence: the force (Gewalt) proper to techne is only a har-nessing of the prevailing and dominance (Walten) of phusis itself.28 By1936, Heidegger’s register has been modified insofar as the ‘The Origin’emphasises the passivity of techne as a bringing-forth. Yet the text wouldalso seem to have generalised this reading of a pre-Socratic sense oftechne in relation to Greek thinking as such and thus in relation toAristotle. It can be said, however, that Heidegger’s reflection on artisticcreation demands a rereading of the sense of not only techne, but alsopoiesis in Aristotle, because the Renaissance conception of creation that‘The Origin’ takes up, according to which the statue is hidden in thework ‘material’ before it is revealed or unearthed by the process of pro-duction, is one that has its origin, via Plotinus in particular, in the workof the Stagirite. In Metaphysics Theta, Aristotle could not link such anidea more clearly to a thinking of possibility:

energeia means the presence – to huparchein – of the thing but not inthe sense which we mean by potentiality. We say that a thing is pres-ent potentially as Hermes is present in the wood [1048a32–3].

Since the wood is the statue potentially, as Aristotle continues, the latterneeds only to be wrought out from the former by a process ofiφαgρ,σι�, a process of abstraction.29

Traditionally, upon its translation as potentia, possibility in this sensehas been conceived of as a state of indetermination. Before the actuali-sation of the specific form of the table, the wood is in a mere state ofindetermination, a state from which other forms or determinationscould have emerged than those in fact actualised. In 1939, however,Heidegger attempts to think this sense of dunamis much more positivelyin translating it as ‘appropriate-for [Eignung-zu]’:

‘Appropriate-for’ means: tailored to the appearance of a table, hencefor that wherein the generating of the table – the movement(μ,ταβολx) – comes to its end. The change of the appropriate woodinto a table consists in the fact that the very appropriateness of



what is appropriated emerges more fully into view and reaches itsfulfilment in the appearance of a table and thus comes to stand inthe table that has been produced, placed forth, that is into the unhid-den [G9 285].

Wood is capable of, appropriate for being formed into a table. In beingappropriated by the producer, then, the being-appropriate-for-the-making-of-a-table of the wood is that which is appropriated, but to beappropriated means here to be brought from prior hiddenness into theunhidden. Yet in its appropriation the wood does not become solelyenergeia or entelechia, but it rather maintains a being-hidden or a being-appropriate, since it always remains possible for it to adopt another form.

After a reflection on the work of art, then, Heidegger returns to Aristotleto show that hule is far from being an inert matter, precisely because it isdetermined as the possible, which is now read as a hidden appropriateness.Certainly, as was shown in the second chapter, Heidegger had alreadytranslated dunamis as Eignung-zu, appropriate-for, in the 1920s, but being-appropriate is now thought in a more profound sense than referentiality.Yet if Heidegger is already on the way to thinking the originality ofAristotle’s determination of matter as the possible in the 1920s, it wouldseem that the hesitation with regard to the sense of poiesis in ‘The Origin’is motivated less – even if the following two points are two aspects of thesame question – by the meaning of hule itself, than by the Latinate and tra-ditional interpretation of ποι,"ν as the operation of an efficient causality.Such hesitation will be replaced by the most categorical of assertions in‘The Question concerning Technology’: ‘Aristotle’s doctrine does notknow the cause that this name designates, any more than it employs acorresponding Greek term’ [G7 11/QCT 8].

Traditionally, and as has already been partially noted, Aristotle is heldto articulate a doctrine of the four causes of beings: the material, formal,final and efficient causes. If, as Cornford writes, ‘it does violence to theEnglish idiom’ 30 to speak of four causes, to speak of matter, for example,as a cause, given our post-Cartesian propensity to think causality purelyas efficient causality, then the question of how the producer is one of fourcauses presupposes the question of what an α$τιον is as such. The Greekoriginally and ordinarily means to be ‘guilty of’, to be ‘responsible for’something, and as Owens notes, Aristotle often uses the term in anadjectival form which accentuates this sense of responsibility.31 Silver,then, is responsible for the chalice, for example, as is the form or aspectthat pertains to it as a chalice. What governs the selection of the matterand the determination of the form is the end or telos of the being, which



is the completion and perfection of the finished product at which theproducer aims.

Concerning what has been interpreted as efficient causality, however,Aristotle speaks of τ� κινtσαν, the mover or τ� ποι8ν, the producer, asthe iρχy τt� μ,ταβολt�, the origin of the movement or change. In thecase of technical production, Aristotle draws this origin back to the eidosin the soul, since a person is the origin of the sort of change that is build-ing, for example, only on the condition that she possesses the art ofbuilding.32 The movement of technical production is born from techne,as we read in The Generation of Animals:

It is the form and the eidos which pass from the carpenter, and theycome into being by means of the movement in the material. It is soul,wherein is the eidos and the knowledge, which causes his hand orsome other part of his body to move in a different way if the work isto be different, the same if it is to be the same; finally, it is by the workof the hands and the body that matter is transformed [730b8–12].

It is the eidos in the soul that moves the hands of the producer, which,in turn, enables the generation of the product. Upon the envisaging ofthe eidos in the soul the poiesis proper can begin, and yet the producer,insofar as she is merely co-responsible for the product, and because thematter is here the appropriate, does not externally impose, simply by theforce of her will, a form on the work ‘material’, but rather lets a possibleform come forth from its prior state of hiddenness into presence.

The fact that production is no mere efficient acting upon an inert mat-ter for Aristotle is evident in Chapter 9 of Physics I. In distinguishingshortage, that is, possibility from the subject in which it inheres, Aristotlecharacterises ‘matter’ as that which desires form and existence:

If being (�ντο�) is something august (θ,gο,) and good and desirable,we might think of shortage as the evil contradiction of this good, butof hule as something the very nature of which is to desire and yearntowards the actually existent [192a20–4].

It is not the shortage or possibility that desires form, for somethingcannot desire its own destruction. It is rather hule, as the ‘subject’ of thechange, which desires the form. Such an appeal to an idea of desire could,of course, be understood as a somewhat poetic anthropomorphism. Butthis understanding is a misunderstanding, and an anthropocentric oneat that. For what, in fact, would be more anthropocentric here, would be



the idea that production simply consists in the imposition of a form firstenvisaged in the mind of the human being on an inert matter. As HeinzHapp has noted in his magisterial study of the concept of hule, this think-ing of desire in matter is neither anthropomorphic nor solely of biologicalsignificance, and is rather ‘a central philosophical thought’33 of Aristotle’swork. From Heidegger’s perspective, it articulates and supposes a con-ception of poiesis as a bringing-forth into the unhidden.

According to Metaphysics Theta, the capacity of the producer to pro-duce something corresponds to a capacity of the materials to adopt theparticular form that the producer has in mind. To δjναμι� το8 ποι,"νthere corresponds a δjναμι� το8 πbσχ,ιν [1046a19–25]. In Physics IIIAristotle analogically compares this relation to that between a pupil anda teacher [202a33–4], and one wonders what sort of efficient causalityhe could have in mind here. Heidegger, in fact, had already pointed tothis analogy in the 1924 lecture course Basic Concepts of Aristotle’sPhilosophy [G18 327], which makes the apparent hesitation in 1930sconcerning poiesis appear all the more remarkable. For rather than act-ing upon the pupil, the teacher, if she is indeed capable of teaching andif the pupil desires to know, ‘merely’ turns or leads the pupil towards apossibility of his own being. The teacher draws knowledge from thepupil or, as might more frequently be said, she merely enables the stu-dent to realise his own potential. Certainly, poiesis is of a higher rankthan pathesis for the Greeks, and as Aristotle writes in On the Soul, ‘the‘agent’ is always superior (τιμι%τ,ρον) to the ‘patient’ and the arche toits matter’ [430a18]. Yet it remains the case that passivity is notabsolutely ‘passive’ for Aristotle, and that ‘action’ is not the externalimposition of force, on things that are essentially inert, that wouldtransform something into something that it simply is not.

The Latinate translation of what Aristotle describes as the origin ofchange with the terms ‘efficient causality’ is commonly understood asnothing less than a faithful transposition of Greek thinking, even if it isnoted that poiein in Aristotle is more revelatory than creative.34 Lesscommonly, the fact that Aristotle draws the origin of technical changeback to the eidos in the soul, and this not merely as a ‘figure of speech’,has been used to argue that the notion of efficient causality has beenunjustly ‘obliterated’35 in his work. For Heidegger, however, this latterargument is utterly anachronistic, and the idea of efficient causality isperhaps the most acute case of how ‘the translation of Greek names intoLatin’ is the ‘translation’, that is, the transformation ‘of Greek experienceinto a different way of thinking’ [UK3 7/6]. The translation of poiesis asfacere, the translation of the origin of the movement of production as



causa efficiens, or, and in short, the translation of ‘RνNργ,ια by actus’ isnothing less than a historical event in which ‘with one blow the Greekworld was toppled’ [G9 286/218]. Beings are now thought within a per-spective or horizon of conquest, domination and subjugation. Action isbut the external imposition of force, the result of a mere act of will, an‘invading’, in the words of Jean Beaufret, of what is other to the agent ‘inorder to “push” it into becoming what it is not’.36

γ – Truth and beingness

After ‘The Origin’, then, Heidegger will show that poiesis is somethingother than the operation of an efficient causality. Heidegger will finallyargue in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ that the Greeks finallygave art, as a mode of bringing-into-the-unhidden, its proper name incalling it poiesis [G7 35/QCT 34]. The sense, however, of this reinterpre-tation of what Heidegger termed in 1927 the ‘ancient conception’ ofbeing as being-produced becomes fully intelligible only in examining therevision that it entails in the interpretation of the two other aspects ofthis ‘ancient conception’, namely being as truth and being as presence.

Truth in the guise of aletheia is now to be thought as the event ofrevealing–concealing by which beings are. Heraclitus’ experience of phu-sis is nothing but an experience of aletheia in this sense, even if the termitself does not appear in the remaining fragments of his thought. ForHeidegger, such an experience of aletheia is what liberates us from our‘modern habits of representation’ according to which man is ‘the carrier,if not the artisan, of unhiddenness’ [G7 273/EGT 109]; and this remarkis to be read as a self-critique insofar as in the 1920s aletheia was inter-preted as a ‘specific accomplishment of Dasein’ [G19 25/17]. Withoutdoubt, the ‘relation’ between Dasein and being remains as a pressingquestion, as Heidegger indicates in the appendix to ‘The Origin’, but thevery task of thought now consists of apprehending unhiddenness as anaccomplishment of beings themselves, an accomplishment that occursfor and before the being that we are.

An experience of aletheia as a revealing–concealing of beings them-selves must be understood as grounding not only the thinking ofHeraclitus but also Aristotle’s physics and the productive horizon of histhinking. Although, as has already been indicated, the NicomacheanEthics does not clearly delimit how techne is a mode of revealing, forHeidegger, it is now to be understood as one that allows beings them-selves to come to presence into the unhidden. Techne is a mode ofaletheuein or revealing because it brings a being as such, and not merely



the eidos in the soul, into the unhidden. Furthermore, if Aristotle’sthinking attains its summit with the determination of being as truth in thefinal chapter of Metaphysics Theta, this truth of the essence of beings isnow to be thought less as a revealing carried out by the human beingand more as a being-revealed, a having-come-into-presence of theessence of beings. It should be noted in this connection that Heideggerhad already, prior to the discovery of earth, made a significant movetowards this interpretation in §9 of the lecture course of 1930, On theEssence of Human Freedom, which, in relation to the final chapter ofMetaphysics Theta, no longer speaks of the uncoveredness of the essenceof beings as an accomplishment of Dasein, but rather of the prior unhid-denness (Unverborgenheit) or emergence (Entborgenheit) of the essence ofbeings.

To be sure, Heidegger’s claim is not that Aristotle or the Greeks in gen-eral specifically reflected on the privative sense of aletheia. According tothe ‘The Origin’,

the hidden history of Greek philosophy consists from its beginningin this: that it does not measure up to the essence of truth that lit upin the word iλxθ,ια, and so, of necessity, has misdirected its know-ing and saying about the essence of truth more and more into thediscussion of the derivative essence of truth [UK3 37/28].

The hidden history of Greek philosophy consists in the fading away ofthe ‘privative’ essence of truth that the term aletheia itself names. Yet theexperience of truth as unhiddenness must be understood to inform thethinking of Aristotle, precisely to the extent that hule has not yetbecome an inert matter, and, thus, that producing is not yet understoodas the operation of an efficient causality. It is only upon the historicalevent of the translation of energeia by actus that the privative dimensionof truth, now thought as veritas, recedes, and that truth itself canbecome simply and solely the mere correctness of propositions. As JeanBeaufret writes succinctly, ‘actus presupposes that a will has procured foritself the means to its end; Oργον presupposes rather iλxθ,j,ιν,iλxθ,ια, an epiphanic or rather anti-phanic plenitude.’37

In parallel to the rethinking of the being of equipment in its ‘use’beyond utility or finality, then, production thought in a Greek sense isshown to have a truth prior to being an operation on a mere inert mat-ter that would be determined and dominated in its essence by humanends. This truth is to be thought as unhiddenness or aletheia. It is accord-ing to such a rereading of the originality of the horizon of production



constitutive of Greek ontology that it is possible to understand the fullextent of Heidegger’s ‘disregarding of the possibility […] that differencesrelating to the essential history of being may yet also be present in theway equipment is’ [UK3 17/13] in the final version of ‘The Origin’. Thequestion of the various historical determinations of equipment is now aquestion because not only does the thinking of reliability move beyondor beneath the Latinate tradition at its end, but, in addition, the Greekessence of production is essentially other than that of the traditionwhich follows it.

Such a remark shows that Heidegger has overcome what, as was notedin the conclusion to the second chapter, he will later term the ‘naivety’of the historical repetition constitutive of fundamental ontology. Thisnaivety consisted in not yet being able to perceive the original differenceof Greek ontology in relation to the tradition that succeeds it. Yet, asI have already argued in advance as it were, this is not to say that thisrepetition was ‘wrong’ or ‘false’, but only that it shows the truth of thetradition that emerges from Greek ontology. The fundamental ontolog-ical reduction of beings to their finality and to the will, to the Um-willenof the human being, regardless of whether the latter is thought in itsessence as Dasein, manifests nothing but the truth of the translation ofenergeia by actus and the reduction of the Greek hule to inert matter.

As the introduction to this chapter indicated, in 1935 Heideggerinitially held the absence of a distinction between the product and thework of art in Aristotle’s thinking to be a ‘remarkable fatality’, one thatachieves a ruination of the essence of art itself. Yet now, at least in rela-tion to the specific question of the earth, the argument is less that Greekontology constitutes a first impoverishment of the essence of art, andmore that Aristotle’s determination of poiesis possesses an originalityunheeded by the tradition. In other words, the lack of a decisively onto-logical distinction between the product and the work of art in Aristotleis less a corruption of what is higher, the work of art, from the perspec-tive of what is lower, the product, than it is an originary thinking ofproduction in general without equal in the philosophical tradition.

It is on this basis that Heidegger is led, in the end, to renounce theattempt to articulate a rigorous distinction between the work of art as abringing-forth of the earth and the product as a mere formation of matter.Henceforth, the focus is less on what distinguishes artistic creation frommere making than on what distinguishes modern technology, that is,modern industrial production from the work of the hand as such and ingeneral, a distinction that the Origin already stresses ‘it is necessary tomake’ [UK3 46/34]. The question now, as Micheal E. Zimmermann has



remarked, is one of the difference between the possibility of an ‘authen-tic production’38 as a bringing-forth of the earth and the machinationsof modern technology. Although, as we have seen in the case ofMichelangelo in particular, it is artistic creation that has pointed, how-ever indirectly, beyond the horizon of Latinate thought insofar as it hasapprehended its materials as more than inert matter, the mere producthas at least the potential to bring forth the earth, to unearth the ‘shapeshidden in nature’39 even if withdrawing itself in the measure that it isused, it does not create the shock of the new proper to the experience ofan original artwork.

The rereading of aletheia called for by Heidegger’s reflection on art,however, is accompanied by a re-interpretation of the very sense of theGreek ousia and the temporal sense of the ancient conception of beingas presence. As Heidegger argues in 1939, in order to comprehend the‘naming power of οSσgα as a basic philosophical word’, it requires to betranslated – at least in Aristotle, who would think ‘in a more Greekmanner’ [NII 409] than Plato – as:

Anwesung, presencing, instead of Anwesenheit, presence. What wemean here is not mere Vorhandenheit, and certainly not somethingthat is exhausted in mere stability; rather: presencing, in the sense ofcoming forth into the unhidden, placing itself into the open. Onedoes not get at the meaning of presencing by referring to mere dura-tion [G9 272/208].

Beyond any conception of substance, and even beyond any conceptionof Vorhandenheit, ousia must be thought as presencing rather than asAnwesenheit, presence. The sense of ousia, in other words, is notexhausted by any mere constancy in presence. Certainly, a being in theproper sense for the Greeks is that which is stably in presence, and asHeidegger notes in reading Physics, II, 1, Aristotle characterises beings asthe συν,στaτα, at 192b13, as that which has taken a stand. Yet we must‘learn to see’ [G9 249/191] that it is only on the basis of entering intopresence that ousia can consequently be thought as constancy.

This argument is developed with reference to Aristotle’s treatment ofthe Sophist Antiphon’s distinction between matter as that which isigδιον and form or, more precisely, >υθμ�� as that which is ?π,ιρον,that which comes in and out of existence endlessly, without limit[193a25–8]. The claim is that this is not a distinction between the tem-poral and the eternal, between matter as the eternal ground of the tem-porary and changing forms that it can adopt. For, on the one hand, what



is supposedly opposed to the eternal is, in fact, without limit; on theother hand, igδιον or i,gδιον has its root in the word i,g, which doesnot originally mean the everlasting or the incessant but rather ‘at anygiven time’.40 The original sense of this distinction can only be under-stood, then, in recognising, first, that limit or πNρα� is to be thoughtpositively as what delimits and thus determines the being as the beingthat it is; second, that it is this being-limited as the achievement of itsentry into presence that characterises that which is as i,g. The latter is thebeing that has come into the unhidden in the stability of its limit orboundary, and it is only on this basis that it may consequently bethought of as eternal, whereas the being without limit is deprived ofthis stable emergence into the unhidden. The distinction at its origin,then, is not to be thought ‘with regard to duration but with regard topresencing’ [G9 269/206].

To be sure, this verbal sense of presencing is not to be thought assimply a thinking of movement or becoming. Heidegger’s thinking ofpresencing after a reflection on the work of art aims, in other words, atmore than a conception of the past and future as a sort of absencewithin a thinking of an ecstatic time. Presencing, to follow the seminarof 1962 entitled Time and Being, is to be thought as akin to a fourthdimension of time.41 What unifies and first grants the ecstatic unity ofthe future, present and past is the entry into presence of this unity itself.The coming into presence of time in its threefold structure is one, again,that is granted to the human being, one that arrives for and before it.Accordingly, the past and future of an ecstatic temporality are no longermerely a sort of absence but are now to be thought verbally as an absenc-ing (Abwesung), the coming-to-presence or granting of a kind of absence.It is in this sense that in 1940 Heidegger determines the ecstatic struc-ture of phusis in Aristotle as the ‘presencing of the absencing of itself,one that is-on-the-way from itself and unto itself’ [G9 299/228].

The physical determination of ousia, then, is to be thought as a pres-encing that is prior to any concept of mere presence. Yet, as Heideggerwill argue in the 1950s, even the categorial determination of beingnessin Aristotle is to be thought in this way.

Why is saying, for the Greeks, a λNγ,ιν, λ�γο�? Because λNγ,ινmeans: to ‘collect’, to ‘gather’, to ‘lay next to each other’. But such alaying is, as a laying that gathers, raises up, keeps and preserves, a let-ting-lie-before that brings something to shine forth, namely thatwhich lies present. However, that which lies present is what comes-to-presence in its presencing [SG 179/107].



The logos is always logos concerning a hupokeimenon but the being of thishupokeimenon is to be thought verbally as a having-come-into-presence.Language, on this account, collects or draws beings into their being, itbrings them into presence and unhiddenness, as Being and Time itselfhad already argued in its own way. Doubtless, such a conception of logosis never made thematic in the work of Aristotle. Nevertheless such aninterpretation is not arbitrary, since it can be understood to be the hori-zon of experience from which Aristotle, perhaps unknowingly, thinksand speaks given the original sense of his poietic determination ofbeings.

The discovery of earth achieved by reflection on art, then, leads to arevision of the three aspects of Aristotle’s determination of being towhich Heidegger had sought to draw our attention in the destructionprojected in §6 of Being and Time: being as being-produced, being aspresence in the temporal sense and being as truth. Yet these senses ofbeing are intertwined, and the weight of Heidegger’s rereading of the‘ancient conception’ of being, falls on one basic point: the sense of pos-sibility in relation to the innerworldly being. It is, at bottom, the rein-terpretation of the sense of dunamis that allows Heidegger to locate athinking of presencing in Aristotle’s work. At any rate, it is far from thecase that Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle in the 1920s ‘differs only inminor and generally contextual ways’42 from the reading articulatedafter a reflection on the work of art, as Thomas Sheehan has argued.Moreover, if it makes any sense to argue, with the advantage of hind-sight, that ‘Heidegger’s programme from the start […] always meant anovercoming of the metaphysics of actuality’,43 then it must neverthelessbe recognised that he has in no way overcome such a metaphysics inrelation to the being of the innerworldly being in the 1920s, notwith-standing the analysis of Zuhandenheit. Such an ‘overcoming’ occurs onlyby means of a reflection on the work of art.

Consequently, the fact that ‘The Origin’ takes up the traditional, andoriginally Aristotelian concepts of essence and existence in reflecting onthe work of art with the terms Riß and quod, the ‘figure’ and the that-it-isof the artwork, is hardly surprising or ‘something remarkable’, as HolgerSchmidt writes. For Schmidt, this is remarkable since ‘it is upon’ the‘archetypical duality’ of existence and essence ‘that the metaphysico-ontological tradition that Heidegger intends to criticise is erected’.44 It isa quite naive idea of critique here which underwrites such astonishment:Heidegger’s critique of the tradition is a delimitation that attempts tothink more originally than the tradition in order to transform it. This iswhat he does in showing that the existence, the quod or the Wirklichkeit



of the work of art is not exhausted by any traditional conception of being-produced or being-created, that is, by any traditional conception of actual-ity. In fact, the Wesen or the coming-to-presence of beings is more originalthan both the traditional concepts of essence and existence as determi-nations of the being of beings; and as Heidegger writes in theContributions to Philosophy, ‘the basic principle’ of another beginning ofthought, of a post-metaphysical and even post-philosophical thinking, isthat ‘all Wesen is Wesung’ [G65 66/46], that all essence is an ‘essencing’ orpresencing.



6Art, World and the Problem of Aesthetics

The preceding chapter of this study showed that although the discoveryof earth leads Heidegger initially to take a critical stance towardsAristotle’s hylo-morphism, this discovery nevertheless leads to a positiveappropriation of the Stagirite’s thinking. Heidegger’s conception of earthdraws from and appropriates Aristotle’s determination of hule as the pos-sible in showing how the latter is not yet what it will become in theLatinate tradition. Examining how the discovery of earth is implicated ina retrieve of Aristotle, however, leads us to a final question, one whichconcerns Heidegger’s conception of world: is it in any sense possible toappropriate positively Aristotle’s thinking with a conception of world inrelation to the work of art?

If the discovery of earth seeks to think more originally what, inHeidegger’s own terms, ‘metaphysics’ knows as the sensible aspect of thework of art, then the conception of world in ‘The Origin’ seeks torethink what has traditionally been understood as the intelligible aspectof the artwork. Of course, and as stated in the introduction to the pre-ceding chapter, the artwork is traditionally distinguished from theproduct insofar as it is not merely formed matter, but formed matter thatshows something other than itself, that in some way has an intellectualcontent or meaning. As Heidegger writes in the second version of ‘TheOrigin’:

[T]he distinctions between form and matter, content and tenor(Inhalt und Gehalt), figure and idea henceforth form the armature ofany conception of the work of art. And if there is a fatality, it consistsprecisely in that these distinctions are always correct and alwaysattestable in the work; for the latter allows itself to be considered as aproduced thing which presents a ‘spiritual tenor’. Art becomes the

168


presentation (Darstellung) of something super-sensible in a formedsensible matter [UK2 53].

The long history of traditional approaches to art in terms of matter,form and intellectual content is no mere aberration since it is alwayspossible to locate the truth or correctness of these concepts in the work.Yet, what Heidegger terms the ‘fatality’ of this history would consist inthe fact that the self-evidence of such approaches only veils a more orig-inal apprehension not only of earth, but also of world, in relation to theartwork.

The ultimate aim of this chapter is to examine the delimitation ofAristotle that Heidegger’s thinking of world in art implies. To this end,the first section of the chapter elucidates such a thinking of world in artin showing how it displaces post-Kantian accounts of the artwork as aDarstellung, as a representation or presentation, of an intellectual contentor concept. More specifically, the aim in this section is to show howHeidegger’s critique of the idea of Darstellung addresses the ambiguitiesof the post-Kantian conception of the symbolic as a mode of presenta-tion that is proper to the artwork. A passage from the introduction tothe final version of ‘The Origin’ indicates clearly that the idea of thesymbolic is in question:

In the artwork something other is brought into conjunction with thething that is made. The Greek for to ‘bring into conjunction with’ isσυμ�bλλ,ιν. The work is a symbol [UK3 4/3].

In this way Heidegger offers an etymology of the originally Greek term,without discussing the long history of the term in modernity. With theaim of elucidating the import of Heidegger’s thinking, then, I will showhow his delimitation of the concept of Darstellung both criticises andappropriates the post-Kantian determination of the symbolic in its dis-tinction from the allegorical, an idea also briefly addressed in the samepassage of ‘The Origin’.

In relating this thinking of world in art to the discovery of earth exam-ined in the preceding chapter, the second section of the chapter will firstexamine the sense of the attempt of ‘The Origin’ to locate in art a possiblemodality of truth, a way in which truth can occur. It is on this basis thatit will be possible to examine Heidegger’s critique of modern aesthetics asan alienation of art from truth, and, finally, the critique of Aristotle that isimplied in his further argument that such aesthetic alienation alreadybegins in Greek ontology. In reading the Poetics I will seek to determine to

Art, World and the Problem of Aesthetics 169


what extent this argument, which Heidegger issues principally in relationto Plato in his Nietzsche, can be understood to apply to the work ofAristotle.

6.2 Art and the problem of Darstellung

α – The return to Greek art and the idea of the symbolic

According to ‘The Origin’, the artwork has the capacity not only to bringforth the earth but also to ‘open up (eröffnen)’ or to ‘set up (aufstellen)’[UK3 28/21] a world. Heidegger articulates this thinking within an inter-pretive return to pre-Socratic Greece, to the epoch of ‘great Greek art’[NI 95/N1 80]. The greatness of this art, as Heidegger underlines in hisNietzsche, rests less in the particular quality of the works than in the rankthat art occupies within Greek existence itself; and, in the words ofHegel, art in this epoch was the ‘highest form in which the people rep-resented the gods to themselves and gave themselves some awareness oftruth’.1 Heidegger, then, can only reaffirm Hegel’s recognition of thecentrality of art within early Greek existence, and yet the very task of‘The Origin’ is one of bringing into question any conception of art asrepresentation.

To this end, in the first instance ‘The Origin’ focuses on a particularform of Greek art, namely architecture. It would seem at least difficult tounderstand a Greek temple as a representation either in the sense of acopy of an already existent being or as a sensible presentation of theideal, conceptual essence of a being, in the originally Platonic sense ofits idea. As Heidegger asks rhetorically: ‘could anyone maintain theimpossible position that the Idea of temple is represented (dargestellt) inthe temple?’ [UK3 22/17]. In truth, the temple does not represent or por-tray anything.

It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley. The build-ing encloses the figure [Gestalt] of the god, and in this concealmentlets it stand out into the holy precinct through the open portico.Through the temple the god is present in the temple. This presence ofthe god is in itself the extension and delimitation of the precinct as aholy precinct. The temple and its precinct, however, do not fade awayinto the indefinite. It is the temple work which first fits togetherand at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths andrelations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory anddisgrace, endurance and decline acquire the figure of destiny forhuman being [UK3 28/20–1].



The temple simply stands in the valley but in this apparently simplestanding rests the plenitude of the being of the temple as a work. Thetemple harboured the statue of the god, but the latter was not in theformer like shoes are in a box. The temple would have rather delimitedthe sacred precinct and, thus, the worldly presence of the god. It wouldhave allowed the god to be present on this earth in being the focus of‘dedication and praise’ [UK3 30/22], and in this way it would haveallowed for a particular ethos or bios, for the ‘paths and relations’ thatconstitute a particular way of life.

Heidegger’s argument, then, is that within Greek existence a temple asa work of architecture was much more than an object of use that wouldhave, in addition, a beautiful form. This Kant argues in the Critique of thePower of Judgment: an architectural work is a useful thing that also has itsend in itself insofar as it possesses an additional, aesthetic finality.2 Yet, forHeidegger, prior to any form of finality, the temple sets up or establisheswhat might be termed Greek culture. Yet, it is not, to use a common turnof phrase that precisely inverts the truth of the matter, an ‘expression’ ofGreek culture, as if this culture pre-existed the temple itself in theinteriority of a Greek ‘consciousness’. Art is not to be understood as anexpression of an age, and the temple does not merely, as might also besaid, give form to Greek culture. On the contrary, as an original work itachieves, establishes and opens this culture itself. Thus, as Heideggerargues, an original work ‘is not an “expression” of what a people is, butthe summersault which points to what this people wants to be’ [UK2 48].

What I have termed, ambiguously enough, ‘culture’, is what isthought by Heidegger as world; ‘in the reflected glory’ of the splendourof the temple ‘there gleams, that is illuminates itself, what we called“world” ’ [UK3 30/22]. In giving only a schematic determination of thenature of world, ‘The Origin’ characterises it as ‘the self-opening open-ness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destinyof a historical people’ [UK3 35/26], and as

more fully in being than all those tangible and perceptible things inthe midst of which we take ourselves to be at home. World is never anobject that stands before us and can be looked at. World is the evernon-objective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birthand death, blessing and curse keep us transported into being [UK329/23].

From these indications it is clear that the notion of world is addressed inbroader terms than those of fundamental ontology. Heidegger now



explicitly relates it to all the phenomena that we would subsume underthe concept of culture. Yet in maintaining the term culture it is necessaryto think it on the basis of a phenomenological determination of world, ifone is to avoid understanding culture as the sum total of extant createdobjects or, worse, as the particular product of the ‘culture industry’.3

‘The Origin’ does, however, speak of world in a verbal form: die Weltweltet. World worlds ‘wherever the essential decisions of our history aremade, wherever we take them over or abandon them’ [UK3 29/23], andthus in the most decisive and the most commonplace moments of his-tory. Such a verbal thinking of world serves to gain for phenomenologymore distance from a thinking of intentionality, and to shift the empha-sis away from an understanding of world as the result of a projection onthe part of the being that we are. There is a ‘worlding’ of the world thatis given to the being-in-the-world that we are, and in its differentepochal formations world is the web of ‘paths and relations’ withinwhich individuals always and already find themselves.

This constitutes only a slight change of emphasis, and Heidegger had,in fact, spoken of world in such a verbal fashion prior to 1927.4 Yet whathas changed upon a reflection on the work of art is the status of theinnerworldly being: the work is an innerworldly being that itself sets upor projects a world. Not only does the world world but also, and moreprofoundly, the work can work, that is, set up and make manifest aworld. ‘Towering up within itself, the work opens up a world and keepsit abidingly in place’ thus giving ‘to things their look [Gesicht], and tomen their outlook [Aussicht] on themselves’ [UK3 29/21]. Here, there isless a shift in emphasis than a definite change of perspective, insofar asthe projection of world does not occur solely as a function of the beingthat we are. Of course, the possible projection of world by the artworkoccurs only in our experience of the work itself. The work, as Heideggerputs it, requires ‘preservers (Bewahrende)’, and preserving is not to bethought here simply as an antiquarian concern with the past, butprincipally as the ability to experience the advent of both earth andworld in the work.5 ‘The Origin’ describes preserving as a modality ofboth knowing and willing, but this knowing and willing is only aresponse to, a safekeeping, as it were, of the capacity of the work to set-upearth and world.

Doubtless, and as Heidegger underlines in ‘The Origin’, the particularityof the ancient Greek world is forever lost to us. Ruins of temples mayremain with some of their physical majesty and splendour intact, butthe world that such works originally instituted exists no longer. Yet, on



Heidegger’s account, the same power to establish a world would haveexisted in the forms of Greek art that can more evidently be consideredas representative:

So it is, too, with the sculpture of the god that the victor of theathletic games dedicates to him. The work is not a portrait [Abbild]intended to make it easier to recognise what the god looks like. It israther a work that allows the god himself to presence and is, there-fore, the god himself. The same is true of the linguistic work. In thetragedy, nothing is staged or displayed theatrically. Rather the battleof the new gods against the old is being fought. In that the linguisticwork arises from the speech of the people, it does not talk about thisbattle. Rather, it transforms that speech so that now every essentialword fights the battle and puts up for decision what is holy and whatunholy, what is great and what small, what is brave and whatcowardly, what is noble and what fugitive [UK3 29/21–2].

The statue of the god was not, at its origin, a sensible, material depictionof the god, which god would only have been accessible in thought. Itwould rather have achieved the worldly presence of the god itself, sincethe statue is, or at least was, a holy, sacred statue, and thus was the goditself. Similarly, the tragedy is no mere representation of the battle of theold and new gods, which battle, in truth, would reside elsewhere than inthe tragedy, but is itself the battle. The sense and direction of Greekculture, and thus of the Greek world, is what is fought out in the wordsof the work.

It is in asserting that the work is that which it allows to come topresence that Heidegger can be understood to take up the long historyof the concept of the symbol in post-Kantian German philosophy. Thework of Kant is important in this history insofar as §69 of the Critique ofthe Power of Judgment opposes an improper use of the idea of the symbolby modern logicians as designating mere arbitrary signs or indicativemarks that relate to what they signify merely by the learnt associationto a signified. For Kant, the symbolic must rather be understood as amode of intuition or presentation, which is to say that the symbolisedis in some sense present in the symbol and not merely associated to it.The highest point of the development of what Kant announces as‘deserving of deeper investigation’,6 however, can be located in thework of Schelling. In §39 of his Philosophy of Art, a text of lectures firstprofessed in 1802, Schelling determines the symbolic as a mode of



presentation in distinction from the schematic and the allegorical asfollows:

The Darstellung in which the general signifies the particular, or inwhich the particular is apprehended through the general, is theschematic. The Darstellung, however, in which the particular signifiesthe general, or in which the general is apprehended through the par-ticular, is allegorical. The synthesis of these two, where neither thegeneral signifies the particular nor the particular the general, butwhere the two are absolutely one, is the symbolic.7

Primarily, the schematic is what Kant had already described as a mode ofpresentation in which the particular is apprehended by means of a gen-eral concept. A particular house, for example, is only apprehended asthe particular house that it is by means of the concept of house. Theconcept is thus presented or exemplified in the individual house – whichwill always be of particular size, form, colour, matter and so on – and itthus provides the rule for any empirical presentation of particularhouses in determining what any house as such must be.

The allegorical, however, is the inverse of this procedure, since the gen-eral is apprehended through and by means of the particular, rather thanthe particular being apprehended through the general. The allegory is amere means for presenting a general truth and refers beyond itself to thelatter. Although, for Schelling, both art and mythology constitute thedomain of the symbolic, it is always possible to read Greek mythologyallegorically: ‘The charm of Homeric poetry and of the whole of Greekmythology rests in truth on the fact that it also contains an allegoricalsignification as a possibility – one can in fact allegorise it as a whole.’8

Greek mythology can be read as the representation of a general truth ofwhich the mythological figures themselves would be a mere particularinstantiation. Athena, for example, as the goddess of war would bemerely a sensible instantiation, a mere empty sign, of the idea or conceptof war. Yet, in this way one passes over an original symbolic meaning.

One ought not to say that, for example, Jupiter or Minerva signify ormust signify this or that. One would have nullified in this way all thepoetic independence of these figures. They do not signify (bedeuten)it, they are the thing itself .9

The two aspects of the symbol, namely the symbol and what is symbol-ised, are, in fact, one. The above passage states that the symbol does not



signify something but as Schelling otherwise writes, if the symbol signifiessomething, it does not merely signify, but it is what it signifies:

Signification (Bedeutung) here is at the same time being itself, it haspassed into the object, being one with it. As soon as we let thesebeings signify something, they are no longer themselves. Their great-est attraction resides even in that, whilst they simply are, without anyrelation, absolute in themselves, they let significance shine throughthem at the same time.10

The symbol is, in fact, constituted by what Schelling terms the ‘absoluteindifference’11 of universal and particular, of signification and sign, in aparticular, individual work of art or mythology. This absolute identitybrings not only the idea of signification, signification as assuming a sep-aration of sign and signified, into question, but also the very idea ofDarstellung itself. The idea of the symbolic pushes the conception ofDarstellung to its limits, for if the symbol is the presentation of a generalconceptual meaning, then it nevertheless cannot be separated from thisconceptual meaning itself.

It is this problematic of the symbolic, then, that Heidegger can beunderstood to take up in asserting the identity of the statue with the godin ‘The Origin’. In §17 of Being and Time, in fact, Heidegger had alreadyencountered, in all but name, the problem of the symbolic within anethnological context, in discussing ‘the abundant use of “signs” in prim-itive Dasein, as in fetishism and magic’. In these cases, ‘the sign coincideswith what it indicates. The sign itself can represent what it indicates notonly in the sense of replacing it, but in such a way that the sign alwaysis what is indicated’ [SZ 82]. The discussion arises on the basis of anattempt to interpret the functioning of signs (Zeichen), beyond any con-ception of the association of ideas, as items of equipment, and thus ofthe essence of indication according to the analysis of Zuhandenheit. Yet,Heidegger can find no way to account for the peculiar identity of signand signified that he has mentioned, and the discussion grinds to a haltat the end of the section with the remark that the categories ofZuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit are inadequate ‘ontological clues’ forany approach to the question. By the time of his reflection on the art-work, however, if Heidegger takes up the problematic of the symbolicmore deliberately, then this is in order to overturn decisively anyaccount of ‘symbolic meaning’ as the Darstellung of a concept. Thestatue of the god is what it ‘signifies’, certainly, but both being and signi-fication are here to be thought according to the horizon of world. World,



as we have seen, is a horizon of hermeneutic, pre-thematic meaning thatis prior to the possibility of conceptual meaning. Within the horizon ofworld, and with such pre-conceptual meaning, things are what they arefor Dasein, and in this way world constitutes the very being of beings.The statue is what it means, therefore, but both meaning and being areto be thought here in terms of the horizon of world. Hence like the tem-ple that houses it, the statue of the god or the theatrical work, as beingwhat they mean, can be understood to serve to establish the pre-thematichorizon of the Greek world, the ‘relations’ and ‘paths’ of a particular wayof life.

It is necessary to note at this juncture that Schelling’s account of thesymbolic in relation to the allegorical and schematic as modes of pres-entation is somewhat formal. The articulation of all three modes interms of the relation between the particular and the general or universalomits a consideration of the resistance to conceptual meaning thatGoethe amongst others holds to be constitutive of art as symbolic in dis-tinction from the allegory12; the symbol, for Goethe, has a general andideal signification, but it signifies only indirectly, for otherwise it wouldturn our interest away from itself in the manner of the allegory. In TheCritique of the Power of Judgment, of course, Kant had already stressed theirreducibility of the meaning of fine art to conceptual meaning, even ifthis is not immediately related to a thinking of the symbolic.13 On thisaccount, the work has qualities or attributes that express aesthetic ideasand by an aesthetic idea, Kant means

that presentation of the imagination which induces much thought,yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatever, that isconcept, being adequate to it, and which language, consequently, cannever get quite on level terms with or render completely intelligible.14

As was noted in the preceding chapter, aesthetic ideas animate the workof art, they are what give soul, spirit or Geist to a work of genius, andthey are representations of the imagination ‘associated to a given concept’,which are nevertheless irreducible to the conceptual understanding. ForHeidegger, however, if there is something in excess of conceptuality in thework of art, then this is no mere ‘aimless imagining of whimsicalities, andno flight of mere representations and fancies into the unreal’ [UK3 60/45],but rather the pre-thematic, hermeneutic horizon of world.

What I hope to have shown in the preceding analyses is that it is notimpossible to retrieve something fruitful from the manifold, moderninterpretations of the idea of the symbol, as Heidegger himself states in



the Contributions to Philosophy. Yet, it is necessary, above all, to overturnthe interpretation of symbolic meaning as a ‘symbolic expression’, as theexternalisation or the Darstellung of a conceptual meaning that wouldoriginally reside in a ‘consciousness’. It is necessary to think the sense ofsymbolic meaning from the perspective of the horizon of world. It is stillincumbent on us to investigate further in this chapter how world can bethought in art, but already on this basis we can understand Heidegger’sremark that the historical ambiguity and confusion surrounding thenotion of the symbol – a notion that Aristotle introduced to philosophywithout adequately accounting for what it might mean – is ‘a truedescendant of the embarrassment in relation to being that reigns inmetaphysics’ [G65 502/353].15 It might be said, more specifically, thatthe confusion surrounding the concept of symbol descends from thetraditional loss or passing-over of the structure of worldhood.

β – Modern art and poetry

Heidegger’s argument is that art was neither an expression of early Greekculture nor a mere sensible presentation of a conceptual truth, butrather the establishment of the Greek world. Yet, in what manner and towhat extent can a setting-up of world be located in the art of our ownage? In posing this question Hegel’s recognition that art in the modernage ‘no longer counts as the highest way in which truth finds existencefor itself’, and that art has ‘ceased to be the highest need of spirit’ shouldnot be ignored.16 Indeed, it is necessary to underline that Heidegger’sreflection on the work of art by no means seeks to give a historicalaccount of what art is and has been since the Greeks. Certainly, ‘TheOrigin’ points to the pivotal and formative role of art not only in pre-Socratic Greece but also in the establishment of the medieval and mod-ern epochs. Yet, in a manner that can be compared to that of Hegel, thisdoes not preclude but rather necessitates a thinking of the historicaltransformations that art endures.17 Moreover, Heidegger does not sim-ply seek to determine what art is in the present. The question is ratherone of what the artwork can be, and ‘The Origin’ enquires into theessence of art ‘in order to be able to ask properly whether or not, in ourhistorical existence, art is an origin, whether, and under what condi-tions, it can and must become one’ [UK3 66/49]. The concern, therefore,is for the possibilities of art rather than its mere actuality and thus, asHeidegger writes forcefully in the appendix to the final version of theessay, ‘what art might be, this is one of the questions to which the essaydoes not give a response. What seems to be a response is only a sign thatguides the questioning’ [UK3 73/55].



Heidegger does, however, focus on painting and poetry as modes inwhich world can be set up and brought into relief. Concerning the ques-tion of painting, in the preceding chapter I argued that the discussion ofVan Gogh’s painting of shoes is introduced in the final version of ‘TheOrigin’ as a way of exemplifying a philosophical thesis whose necessityhad already been apprehended upon the discovery of earth. Moreover,the discussion of this work is quite particular insofar as the argumenthere is not merely that the work sets up a world, but also, and morestrongly, that the painting makes worldhood – and the earth – manifestas such, manifest for us as philosophers. Yet, this is neither the sole northe earliest reading of a painting that Heidegger offers. Within a discus-sion of the idea of schematism in Kant, the lecture course Logic: TheQuestion Concerning Truth of 1925 distinguishes the presentation ofempirical concepts from presentation in the guise of art in referring to apainting of the abstract expressionist Franc Marc entitled ‘The Deer inthe Forest’.

In artistic presentation a concept is represented, which in this casepresents the understanding of a being that is with me in my environ-ment, the understanding of a being and its being in the world; thebeing-in-the-forest of the deer and the way and manner of its being-in-the-forest is presented. We designate this concept of the deer andthis concept of its being as a hermeneutic concept, in distinctionfrom a pure thing-concept [G21 364].

Marc’s painting is one of his most ‘abstract’ and this allows Heidegger toclaim without ambiguity that the painting is neither a representation ofan existent, empirical being nor an empirical presentation of the gen-eral, conceptual essence of a being. The painting rather explores andexploits the horizon of world; it brings into relief the interpretative hori-zon of our being-in-the-world in and through which things are whatthey are. Phenomenology as such shows that vision is not a positivefact, that the perceived world is already pervaded by meaning and inter-pretation, and it is this meaning that painting would be able to draw fromand make manifest. Certainly, art is still understood here as a mode ofpresentation. Although the painting is not a presentation of a ‘pure-thing’concept, it is nonetheless a presentation of the hermeneutic concept ofthe ‘being-in-the-forest’, the being of the deer as we encounter it withinthe horizon of world. The idea of a hermeneutic concept is problematic,and the text clarifies neither how the hermeneutic horizon of world canbe conceptualised, nor the manner in which a hermeneutic concept



could be a concept that is other than an empirical thing-concept. Thisproblem will be dispelled, however, as soon as Heidegger omits, as hewill in the ‘The Origin’, such a hermeneutic concept as the intermediarybetween work and world.

Concerning poetry, §34 of Being and Time had, in fact, already pointedto the poetic work as a manner in which being-in-the-world can bedisclosed. In poetical discourse, the communication of the existentialpossibilities of one’s affective horizon (Befindlichkeit) can become an aimin itself, and this amounts to a disclosing of existence [SZ 205]. Poetrycan disclose the affectivity or mood of Dasein that is constitutive ofworld. It can bring to light and thus set up our affective relation to thethings of the world. A poet can invest the most prosaic or mundaneactivities and things with the whole range of human emotions, and yetthis is no idle poetic projection that would be divorced from the truth ofthings. On the contrary, the poet only develops and exposes the truth ofour irreducibly affective relation to things. Such a conception ofBefindlichkeit in poetry, as Michel Haar has noted, will be fundamentalto Heidegger’s commentaries on the work of Hölderlin from the 1930sonwards.18 It allows Heidegger to delimit and think beyond the concep-tual schema of form and content in relation to poetry. The poetry ofHölderlin, for one, cannot be understood simply as the ‘symbolising ofauthentic reality by images of the un-real that are as concretely sensibleas possible’ [G39 16] in the particular verse form of the poem. For thispoetry articulates a Grundstimmung, a fundamental tone or mood, whichis not to be thought as a mere sonic tonality, but rather as what ‘opensthe world that receives in poetic saying the imprint of being’ [G39 79].The poetry of Hölderlin would dispose its reader to the affective horizonof world and thus to being as such.

The lecture course of 1927, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, devel-ops the remark of Being and Time concerning poetry in examining apassage of Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.19 The passagedescribes an exposed interior wall of a partially demolished row ofhouses. The narrator perceives the poverty, desolation and struggle ofthe daily existence of the former inhabitants in the traces left on thewall by the gas lamps, in the fractured surface covered by rotting paint.This is far from being, as Heidegger argues, a mere anthropomorphicprojection of the human condition onto the wall. On the contrary, ‘thedescription is possible only as an interpretation and elucidation ofwhat is ‘actually’ in the wall, which leaps forth from it in our naturalcomportmental relationship to it’ [G24 246/173]. Things, in otherwords, are already invested with a pre-thematic and pre-conceptual



meaning insofar as they appear within the hermeneutic horizon ofworld, and the work of literature consists in exploring and exploitingthis horizon, in bringing it to the fore.

Poetry, creative literature is nothing but the elementary emergenceinto words (Zum-Wort-Kommen), the becoming-uncovered of Existenzas being-in-the-world. For the others who before it were blind, theworld first becomes visible by what is thus spoken [G24 244/172].

Poetry or literature can bring the world into words, it can make thehorizon of world itself explicit. Of course, this is not to say that creativelanguage necessarily achieves an explicit recognition of the structure ofworldhood in the way of the phenomenologist. Yet if fundamentalontology, in attempting to retrieve and lay the grounds of Aristotle’sdetermination of the logos apophantikos, had argued that the linguisticproposition was to be understood as a revealing or uncovering of beings,now the argument is that language in its poetic dimensions can explore,set-up and, to a certain degree, make explicit the very horizon of worldin and by which beings are. Poetry or creative language, in short, candisclose the being of beings; it ‘brings beings as beings, for the first time,into the open’ [UK3 59/46].

What is overturned within Heidegger’s conception of poetry betweenBeing and Time and the 1930s, however, is the very idea of poetry, andin fact language as such, as a mode of communication. Poetry ‘is nei-ther merely nor primarily the aural and written expression of whatneeds to be communicated’ [UK3 61/45]. The lecture course of 1934 onHölderlin’s ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’ deliberately seeks to dismantleany conception of poetry as a symbolic expression of the imaginationand the lived-experience (Erlebnis) of the poet. The irrefragable correct-ness of this conception only ‘excludes without hope the slightestpossibility of a grasp of the essence’ [G39 27] of poetry itself. For thepoet always writes, speaks and thinks within the definite range of pos-sibilities of a given historical language, of which she is not the absolutemaster. Thus, poetry is to be thought as a work of language in bothsenses of the genitive: it is the work of the poet ‘on’ the given state of ahistorical language, certainly, but more profoundly it is the work of lan-guage itself as something other than a mere, inert thing. Hence, if weare to say that language is expressive, then it is an expression neither ofan isolated subject nor even of a people, but rather an expression ofworld in the sense of an emergence into words of world, of a setting-upof world.20



6.2 Truth and the problem of aesthetics

α – Truth in art

It is on the basis of examining how Heidegger thinks world in art that itis possible to consider the attempt of ‘The Origin’, against much of thetradition of philosophical reflection on art, to understand art as aparticular modality of truth, a specific way in which truth occurs. Inorder to comprehend this fully, however, it is necessary to examine firstof all how world and earth can be thought together as two ontologicaldifferentials, two aspects of the being of beings. Françoise Dastur hasremarked that the task and principal difficulty of any reading of ‘TheOrigin’ consists in not conceiving the duality of earth and world ‘as anew form of the ancient metaphysical duality of matter and spirit’.21 Inorder to avert this misunderstanding, one can only underscore exactlyhow Heidegger thinks beyond such traditional terms. First, as the pre-ceding chapter of this study showed, earth cannot be reduced to any tra-ditional conception of the sensible. It is merely what the tradition hasknown as the sensible, for it is no mere formless matter but already theemerging into presence, the presencing, of latent figures and shapes.Second, the idea of world delimits and transcends traditional determi-nations of the intelligible, for already within the framework of funda-mental ontology it was not simply thought as an intelligible formprojected on or conditioning matter. Although a grounding horizon ofintelligibility, the dis-closure of world in Dasein’s existence is not a nega-tion of any closure but rather occurs only by virtue of an irreducibledepth, darkness or unintelligibility. Being and Time had already termedworld a clearing or Lichtung of being, which clearing is in no way a nega-tion of concealment.22

Consequently, although Heidegger does occasionally characteriseworld in ‘The Origin’ as an openness as opposed to the opacity of earth,23

neither the one nor the other can be isolated as simply a principal oftranslucency or opacity; ‘world is not simply the open which corre-sponds to the clearing, earth is not simply the closed that corresponds toconcealment’ [UK3 42/31]. Concomitantly, neither can be groundedupon the other, even if Heidegger occasionally accords a certain primacyto earth in speaking of it, in Hölderlinian terms, as the ‘native ground(heimatliche Grund)’ [UK3 28/21].24 Concerning the irrevocable inter-twining of both, Heidegger writes that the earth cannot dispense with theopening of the world, just as the world, in turn, ‘cannot soar out of theearth’s sight if, as the governing (waltende) breadth and path of all essen-tial destiny, it is to ground itself on something decisive’ [UK3 36/27].



If world is the governing here, then it still requires to ground itself on‘something’ and thus, in a sense, to be governed. Furthermore, giventhat both earth and world are not things, but ontological differentials,one cannot, properly speaking, even separate earth from world in orderto ground the one in the other. Every attempt to distinguish a worldlyaspect of things from the earth is bound to fail for it is impossible to saywhether the colour of a painting, for example – or colour as such – is ofthe world or the earth and every attempt to explain or separate the earthas the effect of a pure sensibility – in terms of light waves – will transformit into something other than itself.

It is for these reasons that ‘The Origin’ considers the relation betweenearth and world as a strife or a combat:

The strife is not rift (Riss) in the sense of a tearing open of a mere cleft;rather it is the intimacy of the mutual dependence of the contestants.The rift carries the contestants into the source of their unity, theircommon ground. It is the fundamental design (Grundriss). It is theoutline sketch (Auf-Riss) that marks out the fundamental features ofthe emerging of the clearing of beings. This design (Riss) does notallow the contestants to break apart. It brings the contest betweenmeasure and limit into a shared outline [UK3 50–1/38].

Heidegger draws out two senses of the German word Riss: on the onehand, it means a rift in the sense of strife; on the other hand, it means aplan, sketch or design. The strife of world and earth that emerges in thefigure, sketch or design of the work is one that arises from an intertwin-ing that is prior to any opposition and one that can never resolve itselfinto a higher unity. Of course, such a thinking of strife contrasts withthe traditional stress in aesthetics on the formal harmony of the ele-ments of a work but it does not exclude such a conception of harmony.For Heidegger, the apparent repose (Ruhe) of the work in its self-sufficiency has its ‘essence in the intimacy of the struggle’ [UK3 36/27]between world and earth in the coming-to-presence of beings. Strife, inother words, is the prior condition of the harmony of the elements of awork. The strife of world and earth is, however, the manifestation of ayet more fundamental or original strife. This is termed an Ur-streit [UK351/39], which is to be thought as the struggle between concealing andrevealing that is common to, and the abyssal ground of, both earth andworld. In their agonistic unity both allow for an ‘open region (Offene)’ or‘clearing (Lichtung)’ of beings, but this clearing does not give over itsown secret and is always and already a concealing.



The very sense and direction of Heidegger’s thinking, then, is to leadus to apprehend that the work has the capacity to instigate such strife bysetting up earth and world. The most difficult task that is set for us by‘The Origin’ is, in fact, that of allowing and enabling ourselves to appre-hend an ‘agency’ or ‘activity’ in the world that transcends any traditionalcategories of movement or change. Such ‘activity’ is the work-being ofthe work, and work-being is here to be thought verbally, as, precisely, asetting-up of earth and world. If in the 1920s, as we have seen, funda-mental ontology had argued that the human being as Dasein is to bedistinguished ontologically from the finished product, then from 1935Heidegger offers a similar argument concerning the artwork first of all,and consequently concerning beings as such: the work is no mere fin-ished product since in its repose there is an ‘ontological’ power andcapacity at work. It is this capacity that the artist allows to come to pres-ence, and from which she draws in the process of creation. This is to saythat the artist in the process of creation draws not simply from theinnate possibilities of the earth but from the strife of both earth andworld. Concerning world and creation, however, it is necessary tounderline how Heidegger conceives art as drawing from previous cultureand the history of art itself as a repetition, a creative deformation of thepast. What ‘went before is refuted by the work’, and it achieves a creative‘destruction (Zerstörung)’ [UK1 8] of both the past and the present,whilst with respect to its future and its ‘coming preservers’, the work isto be thought as a ‘founding (Stiftung)’ [UK3 63/47] of what is to come.Yet this refutation proper to great, original art is no abstract negation,but rather a return to the source, a return to the origins in order to takeup that which remains as yet undisclosed, hidden in the tradition. Suchan account of the importance of the canon, even if it is not simply amodel to be copied, may often seem to have little relevance to the prac-tices of artists in the present day. Yet, for Heidegger, if art is to be greatart, and if it is to escape being reduced to a function of the expression ofan isolated ego, such historicity of art is essential. On this basis it can besaid that if the artwork ‘comes out of nothing in the sense that it neverderives its gift from what is familiar and already here’, then ‘in anothersense it does not come out of nothing; for what it projects is but thewithheld determination of man’s historical existence itself’ [UK3 64/48].

It is by thus locating in the artwork a historical establishment of earthand world, that art itself can be thought as a specific modality of truth.Truth, on this account, is a happening, an event in and through whichbeings, and thus earth and world, come to presence in a specific config-uration. Of course, such a conception of truth in art is possible only in



destroying, which Heidegger had attempted to do in the 1920s, thelimitations of any correspondence theory of truth, in addition to anyconception of the eternity of truth itself. The truth of art is the ‘estab-lishment (Einrichtung)’ [UK3 49/36] of an open region or clearing ofbeings. The artwork, therefore, is not merely something true but ratherin it and through it truth is at work. Truth and the work-being of thework are here to be thought, once again, verbally or ‘actively’. In itsirreducible singularity, in the shock of its newness, the work in its work-being has the capacity to be a ‘setting-into-work (Ins-Werk-Setzen)’ oftruth. As Heidegger remarks [UK3 65/49], this locution is ambiguousaccording to the two senses of the genitive: the ‘setting into work’ canbe understood as the effect of human endeavour or as the work of truthitself. It cannot be understood as either simply the one or the other, but‘The Origin’ attempts as much as possible to think in the second direc-tion, to counter any reduction of the reception or preservation and cre-ation of the work to the function of an isolated and self-groundinghuman subjectivity. Thus Heidegger speaks of truth establishing itself,and even willing its own establishment in the work: ‘Since it belongs tothe essence of truth to establish itself within beings in order first tobecome truth, an impulse (Zug) to the work belongs to the essence of truthas one of truth’s distinctive possibilities for achieving being in the midstof beings’ [UK3 50/36]. This impulse of truth to the work is neither simplyan expression of the desire of the human being in opposition to the beingsthat it is not, nor something that could be mystically or mysteriouslyabstracted from the Dasein that we are or can be.

In any event, as an establishment of truth, and as what unifies work,creator and preservers, for Heidegger, in this way art is to be thought asDichtung or poetry:

Truth, as the clearing and concealing of that which is, happensthrough being poeticised. All art, as the letting happen of the adventof the truth of beings, is in essence, poetry. The essence of art, onwhich both the artwork and the artist depend, is truth’s setting-itself-into-work. From out of the poeticising essence of truth it happensthat an open place is thrown open, a place in which everything isother than it was [UK3 59/44].

Notwithstanding the English translation of the German term, ‘TheOrigin’ in no way relates this conception of Dichtung to the Greek deter-mination of poiesis. As we saw in the preceding chapter there is a manifesthesitation or uncertainty concerning the sense of poiesis in ‘The Origin’,



and this connection will be made only in Heidegger’s later work.25 Yet,on this account, all art is poetic insofar as it has the capacity to establishan open region of beings. This is not, to be sure, to reduce the manifoldforms of art to a particular linguistic form of art, although it is a deter-mination of art from the perspective of its highest modality, since ‘TheOrigin’, in a quite traditional fashion, delimits poetry or creative lan-guage as the most artistic of all the arts.26

β – Aristotle and the problem of aesthetics

The historical import and significance of this thinking of truth in artshould not be underestimated. Michel Haar’s argument that ‘The Origin’constitutes ‘the most radical transmutation of aesthetics not only sinceKant but also since the Greeks’27 is no exaggeration. On the contrary, itis necessary to state much more directly that Heidegger seeks not merelyto transmute or transform aesthetics, but rather to delimit and tran-scend, to ‘overcome (überwinden)’ in the words of the Contributions toPhilosophy,28 aesthetics as instituting and reinforcing a divorce of artfrom any function of truth. The final task of this chapter consists inexamining this delimitation of aesthetics in relation to the work ofAristotle.

The fact that ‘The Origin’ privileges the question of truth over anyquestion of beauty is indicative of the displacement that aesthetic dis-course undergoes within it. Certainly, the text in no way negates theadequacy or relevance of a thinking of the beautiful, but it is not boundto any traditional conception of it. For Heidegger, in and through thework, the being of beings is ‘illuminated’, and it is this illuminationthat can be thought as beauty: ‘The shining that is set into the work isthe beautiful. Beauty is one way in which truth as unconcealment comes topresence [UK3 43/32]. Beauty would be but the event of the unconceal-ment of earth and world that is achieved by the artwork, and it ‘does notexist merely relative to pleasure, and purely as its object’ [UK3 69/52].Any subjective affects in the experience of the work, therefore, would bemerely accidental in relation to the fundamental occurrence of truth asbeauty.

A passage from the final version of the essay presents in the starkestterms the delimitation of aesthetics that inheres in such a conception oftruth in art:

The essential nature of art would then be this: the setting-itself-to-workof the truth of beings. Yet until now art has had to do with the beau-tiful and with beauty – not with truth. […] In the fine arts, the art is



not itself beautiful, but is, rather, called so because it brings forth thebeautiful. Truth, by contrast, belongs to logic. But beauty is the preserveof aesthetics [UK3 22/16].

The very name that the modern discipline of philosophy concernedwith beauty chooses, however reluctantly, for itself in the eighteenthcentury indicates the manner of its consideration of the artwork.‘Aesthetics’ derives from the Greek aisthesis, and it suggests a study ofthe particular sense experiences that one has before artistic and particu-lar natural objects. In this discipline, the experience of art is thusreduced to a question of the feelings and subjective states, the ‘aestheticexperiences’ and the ‘taste’ of individual human beings, and is alienatedfrom any experience of truth.29 In Kant, for example, truth or knowledgeconsists in the correspondence of a judgement with its object, but aes-thetic judgements can correspond to no object, they can have no objectivevalidity since the beautiful is not a quality of things themselves.30 Ofcourse, Kant will proceed to locate in the judgement concerning thebeautiful, a quasi-objective judgement. Such judgements seem todemand the accord of others, and by means of them we discover inourselves a non-empirical sensus communis or common sense, which con-stitutes an original bind that we have to our fellow man.31 Nevertheless,it remains the case that Kant begins his reflection on the beautiful uponits separation from truth and with its reduction to a mere subjectiveresponse to particular objects.

Yet, is it possible to begin a reflection on art and the beautiful in anyother way? How can the beautiful be posited as a determination ofartworks themselves, given that our responses vary in relation to partic-ular works? In the face of modern aesthetics, Heidegger’s argument mayappear to constitute a quite uncritical, dogmatic and ultimately impos-sible appeal to ‘objective’ qualities of artworks. In this way, however,what is at stake in his conception of ‘great art’, and thus art as such,becomes manifest: any purportedly ‘democratic’ concern to ‘deconstruct’what one might understand to be an uncritical – if not totalitarian, givenHeidegger’s political sympathies in the 1930s32 – appeal to great art isitself only an effect of the aesthetic alienation of art from truth. For assoon as one begins to dispute whether there is, can be or has ever beensomething such as great art, according to the argument that apprecia-tion of art is inalienably subjective, one has lost the highest possibilitiesof art itself; art has become the object of the mere taste of individuals.Heidegger in no way seeks to claim that this is not the situation inwhich we find ourselves. Yet, it is nevertheless possible to look to the



future by appealing to the past in order to show how art can have aformative power beyond mere subjective criteria. Only thus can one over-come the aesthetic subjugation of art within what is but the tyranny oftaste.

There is, of course, a certain violence inherent in Heidegger’s argu-ment that art and reflection on art heretofore has had to do with thebeautiful rather than truth. To remain solely with the question of mod-ern philosophy, art is, as I have indicated, a question of truth in thework of Hegel, and it is for this reason that he brings into question theadequacy of the term ‘aesthetics’ as a title for philosophical reflection onart as such.33 Yet Hegel reflects on truth in art only after the historicalevent of their disassociation, and this is to say that the statementaccording to which art is a thing of the past, insofar as it is no longer thehighest need of spirit, merely registers, after the fact, the effect of themodern aesthetic divorce of art from truth. Moreover, Hegel can acceptthis divorce of art from truth because the ‘highest need of spirit’ is con-ceptual truth; art is a thing of the past because it is no longer anadequate or necessary vehicle of truth thus determined. On this basis wecan see the ultimate stakes of Heidegger’s reflection on art: if art is tobecome once again the highest need of spirit, it is necessary to allow forthe possibility of an essence of truth that would be prior to the truth ofthe proposition or conceptual truth in any sense.

Concerning the meaning and possibility of the advent of aesthetics,Heidegger argues in his Nietzsche [NI 99/N1 83] that aesthetics is condi-tioned and enabled by the primacy of subjectivity in modern metaphysicsitself. At the inception of this metaphysics in the work of Descartes thethinking subject in its self-certainty is posited as the first and highestbeing, the ground of its objects; truth and beings as such are groundedin the self-certainty of the thinking subject. The states of this subjectconsequently take centre stage in the determination of its relation to itsobjects, and, accordingly, the interpretation of the experience of art willfocus on the states of this subject itself. More fundamentally, however,Heidegger argues that modern aesthetics is but a consequence of Greekontology. Although the very concept of aesthetics arises only in theeighteenth century, and for as much as modern aesthetics lends a par-ticular weight to the subjective states of the individual before the work,‘the thing that the name’ aesthetics ‘names […] is old; as old as reflectionon art and the beautiful within Occidental thought’ [NI 93–4/N1 79]. Tospeak of Greek aesthetics would be by no means anachronistic for‘philosophical reflection on the essence of art and the beautiful alreadybegins as aesthetics’.



The argument is, then, that the modern aesthetic divorce of art fromtruth and the aesthetic reduction of art to mere subjective states wouldalready be established in Greek ontology. Heidegger would seem onlyever to speak directly of Plato, and not of Aristotle, in advancing thisargument, but the first element of the argument would find resources inBook X of the Republic, wherein mimetic or representative poetry, whichcomprises tragedy and comedy, is famously condemned and the poetbanished from the polis to come [603b ff.]. In the same way as painting,poetry is at a third stage removed from the truth of the ideas since it cre-ates merely images of images, insofar as it merely copies the empiricalbeing. Worse still, poetry corrupts in appealing to the inferior, irrationalpart of the soul. It appeals to and gives free rein to the passions when ajust and proper life requires the submission of the passions to reason. Inthe case of tragedy, for example, we are led to have pity and sympathyfor what is often but the sensational and irrational behaviour of theprotagonists. Divorced from truth in the work of Plato, then, the art-work becomes a question of the affects that it provokes in those thatexperience it. Certainly, the Phaedrus articulates a thinking of the beau-tiful, which neither separates it from truth nor interprets it purely interms of the affects of the human being. Here the beautiful is thatwhich, from itself, appears the most brilliantly, the RκφανNστατον[250d8]; it is an idea, resident in an other-worldly sphere, but its splen-dour is such that, of all the ideas, it manifests itself the most immediatelyin the sensible world, and it thus serves as a conduit to the true, intelli-gible world. Yet, as Heidegger argues, the very determination of thebeautiful as an idea already prefigures aesthetics insofar as it separatesthe beautiful from the things themselves, thus preparing the ground forits determination as a purely subjective state.34

In what way, however, does Aristotle take up Plato’s determination ofart? What is the situation of Aristotle within this fateful history of aes-thetics? As I have indicated, Heidegger does not address this question inhis Nietzsche. The fourth chapter of this study, however, showed that OnInterpretation appears to exclude poetry from the domain of truth indelimiting the proposition as the only form of discourse that can be trueor false. Even if the truth of the proposition is not determined here ascorrespondence, it would nevertheless remain the case that art is whollyabstracted from the question of truth. Moreover, the famous, perhapsinfamous, conception of tragedy in the sixth chapter of the Poeticsaccording to the idea of katharsis, the ‘purging’ of emotions such as pityand fear, however enigmatic it may be, seems to bring the affects of thesubject onto centre stage. At first glance, then, Heidegger’s argument



concerning the origination of aesthetics in Plato might seem to meetlittle resistance in relation to the work of Aristotle.

Yet these are not Aristotle’s last words on the question of art and truth,since On Interpretation reserves a treatment of the question of poetry forthe Poetics. In the fourth chapter of this text Aristotle offers a decisivestatement of his determination of artwork in the guise, in fact, of the,1κ%ν or visual image:

if one likes to look at images, it is because in looking at them onelearns and one concludes what each thing is as when one says: thishere, that is it. For if one has not seen the thing before, it is not therepresentation (mimesis) that will procure the pleasure and it willrather derive from the perfection in the execution, from the colour orfrom another cause of this sort [48b15–19].

The fact that the passage discusses the artwork in terms of pleasure,Jδονx, might seem only to confirm the argument concerning the begin-ning of aesthetics in Greek ontology. For Aristotle, if one has not previ-ously experienced the thing of which the image is a representation ormimesis, in looking at it the pleasure will be gained not from the fact ofrecognising what it is a representation of, but rather from the excellenceof the execution and the luminosity of the colours. Rather than an intel-lectual pleasure of recognition, the latter would be more of a pure andimmediate aesthetic delight. Yet, crucially, the intellectual pleasure inquestion here is not to be understood in any simple sense, and not simplyas a function of recognising that, for example, a painting of a horse showsa horse rather than an ass. For, as we will see, poiesis as such, for Aristotle,concerns the general rather than merely the particular. The painter, infact, rends the proper form (1δgαν μορφxν) [54b10] of a being, the formproper to a being, according to chapter 15 of the Poietics, in disassociatingit from the matter in which it naturally inheres. In this sense, we mightsay ‘this here: that is it’ before a painting of a horse, not simply becausewe recognise that it is a horse, but because it shows the very essence of‘horseness’ itself. Just as we might say ‘now that is style’ before somethingor someone particularly stylish, for Aristotle, a representation of, say, atable or a bird can show us what a table or a bird is as such. We would thuslike to look at images because they show the very essence or eidos of thatof which they are the representation in the clearest and most apparentfashion. The representation of something would capture, and no matterhow accurate or imitative it may be, the very essence of the thing ofwhich it is an image in a way that the thing itself does not.



It is in this manner that the term mimesis can be understood, a termwhich the Poetics presents as self-evident, and remains undefined in it.35

Mimesis is the representation of a being that draws out from this beingits eidos in making it particularly manifest. It is not simply a representa-tion in the sense of an imitation or copy of a being, but a particularpresentation of the very eidetic essence of a being. Mimesis in Aristotleis, in other words, and to employ somewhat liberally the terminologythat Husserl will develop more than two millennia after the Stagirite, aform of eidetic reduction. Far, at any rate, from being less close to the eidosof a being than the empirical being, as Plato argues in the Republic, therepresentative image can be understood here to be higher with regard tobeing than the mere empirical being itself.

Such is the poietic essence of painting. It is poietic or creative in that itbrings forth, brings to light, the eidetic essence of its model. Yet, as indi-cated, Aristotle writes that poiesis ‘is more philosophical and more noblethan history: poiesis relates to the general, history to the particular’[51b5–7]. The remark is issued specifically in relation to poetry, but itcan be understood to apply to poiesis as such. For Heidegger, as he writeselliptically in the ‘Letter on Humanism’, the import of these words has‘scarcely been pondered’ [G9 336/275], but art can be understood to bemore philosophical than history because it does not content itself withmerely recounting facts in their singularity. The term mimesis originatesas a denomination of mime and ‘theatrical representation’, and in chapter17 of the Poietics Aristotle develops his argument in reading Euripides’Iphigenia among the Taurians:

This is what I mean by taking into view the general, concerningIphigenia for example: a young girl who is to be sacrificed is takenfrom those that were to sacrifice her, without them knowing, to anothercountry where the custom was to immolate strangers to the Goddess;she is invested with this ministry; some time later the brother of thepriestess arrives, and this because the oracle of the God ordered himto go there and in view of a goal foreign to the plan of the play, thuskata symbebekos; having arrived there and being made a prisoner, onthe point of being sacrificed, he reveals who he is […]; in whichresides the cause of his salvation [55b2–12].

Such, for Aristotle, is the essential structure or the logos of the tragedy,upon which the particular details and names of characters supervene.Indeed, it should be underlined here that all the proper names of thespecific characters are effaced in this account of Iphigenia. What, in



essence, the tragedy makes manifest is not a particular girl, Iphigenia, ina particular country, Tauris with a particular priestess, but rather thesituation of a girl as such, in a country as such, with a priestess as such.The tragedy makes manifest a general situation in which, as JeanBeaufret writes, ‘anyone could find him or herself’,36 and it thus bringsto light the very eidetic essence of the situation.

In the Metaphysics Aristotle states that to philosophise is tophilosophise about the truth. If poetry is more philosophical than therecounting of history, it can also be said, therefore, that the former hasmore truth, that it is truer than the latter. Although On Interpretationseems to exclude poetry from the domain of truth in delimiting theproposition as the sole form of discourse that can be true or false,Aristotle therefore cannot be understood to separate art purely andsimply from truth. Moreover, the apprehension of the eidetic essence ofa being is, as both On the Soul and Metaphysics Theta argue, always true,and thus the particular presentation of the eidos of a being in art can beunderstood to be truer than the everyday perception of beings. Art inAristotle, then, has not yet been absolutely divorced from truth tobecome merely a function of pleasure and taste. And yet the truth andphilosophical value of the artwork is ultimately thought only in eideticterms. A thinking of earth is not foreign to Aristotle, certainly, butPlatonic eideticism seems to foreclose an original apprehension of thework in terms of world in his thought. In the end, perhaps more con-crete evidence than this eidetic determination of art could not be foundfor the claim that Aristotle passes-over the structure of worldhoodwithin his thinking as a whole. Thus, Heidegger’s attempts in the early1920s to retrieve a thinking of world from Aristotle show themselves,once again, to be, in the end, over-interpretations. Finally, the loss of worldimplied in this eidetic determination of art offers us one way of under-standing Heidegger’s argument in ‘Metaphysics as the History of Being’, atext to be found in the second volume of his Nietzsche, that if Aristotlethinks in a more Greek manner than Plato, then between the earlyGreeks and Aristotle there stands the Platonic idea.37 Aristotle, afterHeraclitus and according to his thinking of the possible, can be under-stood to think being as coming-to-presence, and yet Platonic eideticismleads him to pass over the structure of world.



Conclusion

In being it is only the possible that holds sway (west) as itsdeepest cleavage (Klüftung), so that it is in the shape of thepossible that being must first be thought in the thinking of theother beginning [G65 475/334].

In the Contributions to Philosophy, written in the late 1930s, Heideggerdiscusses the necessity of overcoming aesthetics and the divorce of artfrom truth that it institutes. Overcoming the aesthetic scission of art andtruth can only be achieved, as we read, by ‘overcoming metaphysics’. Yetovercoming metaphysics is not ‘discarding the hitherto existing philoso-phy but rather the leap into its first beginning, without wanting to renewthis beginning – something that remains historically unreal and histori-cally impossible’ [G65 504/354]. Metaphysics cannot be rejected as anerror, as an erroneous opinion, and as §6 of Being and Time had alreadyshown in relation to Descartes, it is precisely the aim to discard the tra-dition that leads to its intensification and perversion. Thus, the task con-sists, first of all, in repeating, and not simply reiterating or renewing, whatHeidegger now terms the ‘first beginning’ of ‘philosophy’, which occursin pre-Socratic thought, and which is hence prior to the actual advent ofphilosophy or metaphysics as such in the work of Plato and Aristotle. Infact, in taking this leap back to pre-Socratic thought, overcoming meta-physics means ‘freeing the priority of the question of the truth of being inthe face of any “ideal”, “causal” and “transcendental” and “dialectical”explanation of beings’ [G65 504/354].

On this account, then, metaphysics is that mode of thinking thatpasses over the truth of being, and that is to say, that passes over bothbeing and truth thought in a verbal sense as presencing, as an event ofcoming to presence. Of course, although a particular mode of thinking

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metaphysics has taken many forms, such as, as Heidegger seems to argue,Plato’s eideticism, Aristotle’s causal account of beings, Kant’s transcen-dental philosophy and Hegel’s dialectical thinking. Yet, all of thesedifferent forms of metaphysics would either, at best, separate being frombeings as condition and conditioned in passing over the event of pres-encing by virtue of which beings are; at worst, they would reduce beingto what is but another being, as is the case with Plato’s eidetic interpre-tation of beings.

With such an argument, Heidegger may seem to take a firmly negativestance towards Aristotle’s ontology. It would appear that the argument isthat Aristotle’s causal determination of being precludes an original appre-hension of the truth of being. Yet, this section of the Contributions isattempting to delimit and depict the history of Western metaphysicsusing, inevitably, very broad brush strokes, and it would be a mistake tounderstand the remark as relating to Aristotle in this sense. For, as we sawin the fifth chapter of this book, Aristotle’s causal account of beings doesnot necessarily sideline a verbal thinking of being, and it is in fact one ofAristotle’s four causes, namely matter thought as ‘possibility’, from whichHeidegger draws a thinking of being as the possible; and such a thinkingof being as the possible is pivotal to what the Contributions, to follow theepigraph that heads this conclusion, names the task of ‘another begin-ning’ of philosophy, another beginning of philosophy in contemporarythinking that can only occur in repeating the first beginning of philoso-phy. Certainly, and as we saw in the sixth chapter of this book, Aristotle’sconcern for an eidetic determination of beings may to some measurepreclude a thinking of world, but a conception of being as presencing isnevertheless not extinguished by any such eidetic thinking.

In the introduction to this book, I first presented the claim thatHeidegger issues in Meditation according to which Being and Time repre-sents an attempt to reduce metaphysics to its own presuppositions, whichreduction would consequently set phenomenology on the path towardsan essential delimitation or overcoming of metaphysics itself. From thisperspective, the delimitation or ‘overcoming’ of metaphysics necessitatedby a thinking of being as presencing would have been made possible byfundamental ontology, which would be fundamental not only in that itseeks to articulate the question of the meaning of being, but also in thatit would seek to make explicit the very foundations of Greek ontology.The second and fifth chapters of the book cashed out this argument inrelation to Heidegger’s accounts of equipment. It was shown, first of all,that fundamental ontology brings to light that the Aristotelian reductionof beings to the ‘actuality’ of ‘formed matter’ is already a reduction of

Conclusion 193


what is to what can be used, dominated and set to human ends. In thisregard, fundamental ontology offers nothing like a rival thesis to ‘Greekontology’, and this to such an extent that in the 1920s Heidegger caneven claim to find an analysis of Zuhandenheit in the texts of Aristotle.Instead, it draws out what is implicit in Aristotle’s thinking. Of course,and as became clear in the fifth chapter, after fundamental ontology andby virtue of it Heidegger will go on to argue that Aristotle’s idea of thebeing of the product is, quite literally, a world away from subsequent con-ceptions of actuality, form and matter. Yet, as was contended, this doesnot mean that fundamental ontology was wrong, but only that it makesmanifest the truth of the tradition that follows from Greek ontology.

It is in this way that the movement in Heidegger’s interpretations ofpoiesis from the 1920s to the 1930s is to be understood as a leading backof metaphysics to its own presuppositions, one which subsequentlyenables a delimitation of the ‘metaphysics of actuality’. Yet how are weto understand fundamental ontology as a reduction of metaphysics toits own presuppositions with regard to the two other aspects of the‘ancient conception’ of being delineated in §6 of Being and Time, namelybeing as truth and being as presence? Concerning the first of theseaspects, examining Heidegger’s claims that Aristotle thinks proposi-tional truth beyond, or prior to, any idea of correspondence, and that heapprehends perception as a more fundamental stratum of truth itself,the fourth chapter showed that it is less a question here of working outthe implications of what Aristotle does say, than it is one of counterpos-ing some of his statements to others. Nevertheless, this appropriation ofAristotle can still be understood in terms of a reduction of metaphysicsto its own presuppositions: Heidegger attempts to unveil an originaltruth of Aristotle’s thinking that would have remained undisclosedin the tradition. More specifically, fundamental ontology sought tobring to light the prior grounds of any correspondence theory of truth,and it is only after having unveiled them that phenomenology can lookbeyond the limits of Aristotle’s thinking itself. In this connection, itshould be recorded here that the apparently pragmatist concern for thetruth of the proposition in Being and Time is no more a phenomenolog-ical invention than is the analysis of equipment. The movement inHeidegger’s thinking concerning language in other words, is no simplechange of focus from the everyday prose of the world to poetic languagebut instead a historical act of ground-laying, by means of an account oftruth as an ‘uncovering’ of beings, of the traditional account of theproposition, which in turn enables a reflection on language in its more‘creative’ dimensions as bringing beings into their being.



It is perhaps more difficult to understand the third aspect of the‘ancient conception’ of being, namely being as presence in the specificallytemporal sense of the term, according to the schema that Heidegger fur-nishes in Meditation. The account of ecstatic temporality in the 1920s mayseem to draw out the presuppositions of metaphysics much less than itseeks to oppose Aristotle’s exoteric conception of time. Certainly, on theone hand, Heidegger claims to develop the temporal meaning of beingthat was already, if indirectly and inadequately, apprehended in Greekontology; but, on the other hand, and as was noted both in the introduc-tion to the book and in its third chapter, Heidegger’s discovery of Dasein’stemporality and the concomitant diagnosis of the exoteric nature ofPhysics IV seem to inflect negatively his Aristotle interpretation in itsentirety, his earlier, more generous readings of Aristotle’s anthropology, inparticular, becoming more critical by 1927. Yet, as we have seen,Heidegger’s attempted delimitation of Physics IV, which itself is far frombeing a univocal text, is made possible by an appropriation of Aristotle’sown conception of ecstatic movement, and so this critical stance is in factmuch less justified and clear cut than it may initially seem.

The idea, therefore, that the text of Being and Time draws metaphysicsback to its presuppositions is to be thought in different ways in relationto the different aspects of the ‘ancient conception’ of being thatHeidegger takes up. Yet it has become clear that what is pivotal in themovement from the reduction of metaphysics operative in fundamentalontology to the later conception of an ‘overcoming’ of metaphysicsitself is Heidegger’s interpretative appropriations of the sense of poiesis.Consequently, for as long as we hold the most significant and originalcontribution of Being and Time to philosophy to be its interpretation ofAristotle’s interpretation of praxis the most profound sense of not onlyHeidegger’s text of 1927, but also those that follow it, will remainopaque to us.

Conclusion 195


Notes

Introduction

1. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, ed. J. Cottingham, 1996) p. 17.

2. One of the most acute expressions of the argument that philosophy is aparticular mode of thinking that begins with Plato is to be found in JeanBeaufret’s La Naissance de la Philosophie in Dialogue avec Heidegger, Vol. 1,Philosophie Grecque, (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1973) p. 20.

3. Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, A66, B90 (Gesammelte Schriften, Berlin AcademyEdition, Vols. III and IV; translated by N.K. Smith as Critique of Pure Reason,Macmillan, London, 1929).

4. I return to the question of temporality in Chapter 3 of this study, but seeChapter V of Being and Time, particularly §74, for the analysis of how historio-logical Wiederholung – a fetching again, a retrieving of the past as a possibilityfor the present – is grounded in Dasein’s historicity.

5. Cf., in particular, the conclusion to Sadler’s Heidegger & Aristotle: The Questionof Being (London: Athlone Press, 1996).

1 The Question of Being

1. Cf., for example, Metaphysics, E, 1, 1025b9 and 1026a31. Following recent con-vention, I refer to the books of the Metaphysics with the Greek alphabet. Thisis the only text of Aristotle that I cite in this way and this obviates the need tocite the Metaphysics by name in the references.

2. Cf. Δ, 7, 1017a7. On this point and for Heidegger’s most incisive reading ofAristotle’s articulation of the question of being, cf. §2 of the lecture course of1931 on Metaphysics Θ, G33.

3. This distinction between the Leitfrage or guiding question, and the Grundfrageor grounding-question is a constant in Heidegger’s work of the 1930s. Cf., inparticular, the first chapter of Introduction to Metaphysics and NI 79/N167 ff. Onthe question of ontology, see, in particular, §106 of the Contributions toPhilosophy, which concerns ‘The Decision about all Ontology’.

4. Cf. Γ, 1, 1003a.5. Cf. Frank Capuzzi’s note on p. 154 of N4: ‘The term ontology apparently was

coined by Goclenius in 1613, then taken up by the Cartesian philosopherJohannes Clauberg (1622–65) into his Metaphysics de ente sive Ontosophia of1656, and finally established in the German language around 1730 by theLeibnizian rationalist Christian Wolff (1679–1754).’

6. Cf., for example, Γ, 3, 1005b1. The non-extrinsic nature of the title ‘ontology’ isclear given the Greek words of which it is composed, but for the same argumentconcerning ‘metaphysics’ cf. Pierre Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966) p. 28 ff. and NII 213/N4 159 ff.

196


7. See Eudemian Ethics I, 8, 1217b 33 ff. On the idea of particular sciences relat-ing to one genus, see Γ, 2, 1003 b 19.

8. Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics (Toronto:Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978, 3rd edition) p. 139.

9. For Owens’ arguments concerning ‘entity’ and for a useful treatment of thelong history of both substantia and essentia as translations of ousia see thefourth chapter of The Doctrine of Being. For further studies of this history see‘Notes sur le vocabulaire de l’être’ by Etienne Gilson, of whom Owens was apupil, in L’Etre et l’Essence (Paris: Vrin, 1948) and, in particular, J.F. Courtine’s‘complement’ to Gilson’s text, ‘Note complémentaire pour l’histoire duvocabulaire de l’être’ in Concepts et Catégories dans la Pensée Antique (Paris:Vrin, 1980, ed. P. Aubenque), which approaches Boethius’ translations of theGreek from a Heideggerian perspective.

10. Certainly, this fact has by no means convinced anything like the majority ofcontemporary English-language Aristotelians as to the inadequacy of thetranslation ‘substance’. Mary Louise Gill, for one, acknowledges the problemin her Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity (New Jersey: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1989) p. 13, n. 2 but holds, nevertheless, that ‘substance’ doesnot betray Aristotle’s thinking.

11. C.H. Kahn, The Verb ‘Be’ in Ancient Greek (Dordrecht and Boston: D. RiedelPublishing Company, 1973) p. 458.

12. Without referring to Heidegger, Owens (op. cit., p. 150) offers such an interpre-tation on the basis of the claim that the compound forms derive from the sim-plex: ‘ΠαροSσ�α and iποSσgα are rendered in English by presence and absencerespectively. The notion conveyed by the syllable “sence” in these words wouldperhaps best correspond to the Aristotelian οSσgα’. Heidegger deals with theformal objection to his thesis in the lectures of 1930, On the Essence of HumanFreedom [G31]. Sub-sections 7–10 of these lectures constitute Heidegger’s mostextensive treatment of ousia but for an earlier extensive treatment see §7 of thelecture course of 1924, The Fundamental Concepts of Aristotle’s Philosophy [G18].

13. On this point, see Heidegger’s essay of 1957 entitled ‘The Onto-theologicalconstitution of metaphysics’ in Identity and Difference. For an earlier discus-sion of the question in relation to Aristotle, see G19 §19. See also CatrionaHanley’s Being and God in Aristotle and Heidegger (Lanham: Rowman &Littlefield, 2000).

14. Rudolf Boehm, Das Grundlegende und das Wesentliche (The Hague: MartinusNijhoff, 1965) p. 59.

15. Cf. Posterior Analytics, I, 22, 83a25.16. For a treatment of this problem, see Chapter 2 of Aubenque’s Le problème de

l’être chez Aristote.17. Cf. Z, 13 and 14.18. Gilson, op. cit., p. 52.19. David Bostock, Aristotle’s Metaphyiscs Z and H (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1994) p. 72.20. Heidegger proposes this interpretation in 1927 [G24 151/107] but he is

hardly the first to do so. For a comprehensive survey of the interpretationsthat have been proposed of the locution, see Aubenque, op. cit., p. 460 ff.

21. As D.W. Graham notes in ‘The Paradox of Prime Matter’ (Journal of the Historyof Philosophy, 1987, p. 476, n. 5) it is for this reason that Aristotle is not

Notes 197


altogether satisfied in denominating earth, fire, air and water with thetraditional name ‘element’. The four ‘elements’ are not yet what is absolutely‘elemental’ and thus On Generation and Corruption [I, 6, 322b1], for example,speaks of them as the ‘so-called elements’.

22. Critique of Pure Reason A 266, B 322.23. According to Heidegger in 1922 ‘Aristotle goes along with factical life in

factical life’s own direction of interpretation’ [PIA 45/385].24. Cf., in particular, the essay of 1922, Phenomenological Interpretations with

Respect to Aristotle and SZ 24. Concerning the genesis of Heidegger’s readingsof the senses of ousia, see Chapters 5 and 6 of Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis ofHeidegger’s Being & Time)(Berkeley: California University Press, 1993).

25. Cf. Z, 7, 1033b1 ff.26. I follow Ross’ interpretation of this argument on p. 64 of his Aristotle (London:

Methuen, 1923).27. As Pierre Aubenque remarks (op. cit., p. 431) even essential attribution

requires a movement of the imagination that dissociates the unity of beinginto a subject and essential predicate.

28. The conception of primary matter – Πρ%τη Bλη – that Aristotle explicitlynames and determines in On Generation and Corruption [II, 1, 329a24 ff.] as apure possibility, that is, pure shortage has come under much scrutiny in con-temporary commentary. For the idea is somewhat paradoxical: if matter hasno determinate qualities whatsoever than it is, strictly speaking, nothing.Nothingness would, thus, ‘underlie’ change as one of its principles. This dif-ficulty has occasioned revisionistic readings (e.g. H.R. King ‘Aristotle withoutPrima Materia’ in the Journal of the History of Ideas, 17, 1956, pp. 370–89)which argue that Aristotle does not, in fact, require a thinking of prime matterat all and that the four elements are the most basic substrate of all things.For a bibliography relative to this question see D.W. Graham’s ‘The Paradoxof Prime Matter’ (art. cit.) and for an extended study of the problem cf.Section 3.2, in particular, of Heinz Happ’s Hyle: Studien zum aristotelischenMaterie-Begriff (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971).

29. I return to this question but on the relation of the categorial to the poeticdetermination of being, see Jean Beaufret’s ‘L’enigme de Z’, 3 in Dialogue avecHeidegger 4 (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985), p. 20.

30. Cf., for example, Z, 1, 1028a14 and 7, 1032b3.31. Gilson op. cit., p. 54.32. Z, 4, 1029 b13 and Second Analytics, II, 2, 92a7.33. On this point see Jean Beaufret, ‘L’engime de Z’ (art. cit.).34. Cf. 1028a31 ff.35. Cf. Ross, Aristotle (op. cit.), p. 166.36. Cf. SZ 46 ff. and 319.37. Cf. §8 of G31.38. Aubenque, op. cit., p. 437. The third chapter of this study returns to the

analysis of the three principles of movement.39. NII 431/EP 27.40. Gilson, op. cit., p. 56. Cf. Owens, op. cit., p. 359, n. 58. For this ‘Heideggerian’

critique of Gilson see Jean Beaufret, ‘Note sur Platon et Aristote’ in Dialogueavec Heidegger I (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1973).

198 Notes


41. Werner Jaeger, Aristoteles. Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung (Berlin:Weidmann, 1923; translated by Richard Robinson as Aristotle. Fundamentalsof the History of his Development, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1934; 2nd edition1948).

42. I return briefly to the question of accidental being in the second chapter ofthis study but for a full discussion of this question, see Owens, op. cit, p. 307ff. and the first chapter of Franz Brentano’s Von der mannigfachen Bedeutungdes Seienden nach Aristoteles. Freiburg im Breisgau, Herder, 1862; translated asOn the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle (Berkeley: California University Press,trans. R. George, 1975).

43. In medieval Scholasticism Πρ�� ;υ equivocality will be interpreted under thetitle of analogia attibutionis, an analogy of attribution but as Owens (op. cit.,p. 125) notes, this sense of the term analogy, as opposed to analogy as theequality of two relations, is not to be found in Aristotle.

44. Cf. K, 3,1061a35 where Aristotle speaks of a τι κοιν�ν ‘to some sort of com-mon’ but, to be sure, this is not the commonality of a genus.

45. Cf. G33 8–9/6. See infra 2.2 for an account of Kant’s determination ofpossibility.

46. Ted Sadler remarks on the impossibility of the argument in 1931, and yet itis far from the case that otherwise ‘Heidegger does not disagree with the pri-ority traditionally accorded to the categorial way of saying being’ (op. cit.,p. 51). Admittedly, the sense of priority in this sentence is vague but being aspossibility and actuality and being as truth are prior, for Heidegger, in thesense of constituting the highest ways in which being is said.

2 Repeating Metaphysics: Heidegger’s Account of Equipment

1. Cf., in particular, ‘The Question concerning Technology’ in G7/QCT.2. Hubert Dreyfus, ‘Heidegger’s History of the Being of Equipment’ in Heidegger:

A Critical Reader, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) pp. 183–94 (originally publishedin The Thought of Martin Heidegger, Tulane Studies in Philosophy XXXII, ed.M. Zimmermann, 1984, pp. 23–25).

3. Michel Haar, Le Chant de la Terre, (Paris: L’Herne, 1988). I return to Haar’sargument in concluding this chapter.

4. Michael E. Zimmermann, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology,Art, Politics, (Indiana University Press, 1990) p. 148. See, in particular, thetenth chapter of Zimmermann’s study: ‘Being and Time: Penultimate Stage ofProductivist Metaphysics?’

5. In his The Later Heidegger (London: Routledge, 2000, p. 218, n. 9) GeorgePattison summarises the stakes of the argument thus: ‘some argue that Beingand Time itself endorse a technological–pragmatic view of the human sub-ject. See for example, Haar 1993. […] Zimmermann, however, emphasisesthat Heidegger was already privileging the world of the craftsman’s shop overagainst factory production in Being and Time’. The term ‘correction’ is, infact, one used by Jacques Taminiaux in his Lectures de l’ontolgie fondamentale,(Grenoble: Gerome Million, 1995) p. 170.

Notes 199


6. My argument develops Robert Bernasconi’s judicious comments concerningthe stakes of the analysis of equipment as a repetition of Greek ontology inhis ‘The Fate of the Distinction between Praxis and Poiesis’ (Heidegger Studies,Vol. 2, 1986, pp. 111–39), comments that would seem to have been ignoredin the debate that I have delimited. In referring to the above passage fromG33, Bernasconi writes:

The remark still leaves unexplained the precise purpose of the discussionof equipment in Being and Time, but it leaves no doubt that the impor-tance of the discussion will be overlooked if we focus only on the supposednovelty of the descriptions to be found there, or its phenomenologicalcredentials (p. 114).

The very intention of this chapter is to bring to light the unexplained ‘pur-poses’ of this discussion.

7. The term ‘debt’ is one that Zimmermann uses (in the heading of a section ofChapter 9 ‘Heidegger’s debt to Kant and Aristotle’ op. cit., p. 143). As I argue,it is precisely the approach that such a term presupposes which prevents anadequate response to Dreyfus’ argument.

8. Such a formulation constitutes only a slight deviation from Franz Brentano’sdefinition of intentionality as a sich richten nach. Cf. Psychologie vom empirischenStandpunkt (3 volumes) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968) I, pp. 124–5 translatedas Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, London: Routledge, 1973, trans.A. Rancurello, D. Terrell and L. McAlister, p. 88.

9. As Macquarrie and Robinson note (Being and Time, Blackwell, 1995, p. 97),das Zeug can also mean ‘stuff’. The artificial product is still meant here butquite indifferently as to serving a purpose.

10. Cf. the note of 1911 in Brentano’s Psychologie (op. cit.) Vol. II, p. 9. The termintentio was used as a translation of the Arabic ma’na and as Owens notes (op.cit., p. 133, n. 108), ‘the early translators of Avicenna employed intentio in anumber of senses but apparently with the common basis of indicating thedynamic function of intellectual activity in the Avicennian interpretation ofAristotle’. The term in its original philosophical usage is thus not specificallylinked to the will in the sense of wanting to do something but for a fullaccount of its history see the entry for intentio in the Historisches Wörterbuchder Philosophie (Basel and Stuttgart: Schwab & Co., Vol. 4., 1976).

11. This is what Heidegger terms also the ‘Schon-Anwesende’ in 1925 [G20270/198]. In his article ‘Donner/Prendre’ in Heidegger et la phenomenology(Paris: Unn, 1990), p. 293. Jean-François Courtine holds that the determinationof nature as the immer schon Zuhandene, as a ‘very singular’ formulation, betraysanother thinking, which ‘according to the economy of the analyses of theperiod of Sein und Zeit’, would hold nature to be vorhanden rather than zuhan-den. Although the author rightly stresses the positive sense of Vorhandenheit asnaming the disposable, the available, it is necessary to recognise why the‘always and already Vorhanden’ becomes ‘zuhanden’ in Being and Time.

12. It is misleading to translate Bedeutsamkeit as significance, since Heidegger dif-ferentiates the references that constitute this primordial level of meaningfrom the specific phenomenon of the sign. Cf. §17 of Being and Time.

13. This is clear from the lecture course of 1919–20 Zur Bestimmung derPhilosophie, G56–7; Towards a Definition of Philosophy (London: Continuum,trans. Ted Sadler, 2000).

200 Notes


14. Dermot Moran, ‘Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl’s and Brentano’s Accounts ofIntentionality’ in Inquiry, Vol. 43, No. 1, March 2000, p. 62.

15. Cf. §§1–5 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews, 2000).

16. Cf., in particular, §29 of Being and Time.17. René Descartes’ Responses to the Third Meditations, (Paris: Vrin, ed. Adam &

Tannery, 1983, VII, p. 194).18. Thus, as Gilson notes (op. cit., p. 16) there is a certain ‘slippage’ of the term in

the seventeenth century to the effect that existentia becomes simply anequivalent of esse. This slippage constitutes the possibility of Descartes’ con-cern for the existence of God.

19. The following chapter of the current book returns to this question.20. Cf. Courtine, ‘Donner/Prendre’, (op. cit., pp. 299–300).21. Heidegger adjoined the following note to the reference to the Greek term,fδο� in §13: ‘Why? ,fδο�–: μορφx–Bλη! From τNχυη and thus as an ‘artistic’(künstlerische) interpretation; if: μορφx then not as ,fδο�, 1δNα’ [SZ 441].

22. In the essay of 1922 Heidegger distinguishes the three terms thus: dunamis isthe ‘always-particular being able-to-have-available’, energeia is ‘the using of thisavailability’ and entelechia is ‘the utilising holding-in-truthful-safe-keeping-of-this-availability (das verwendende in Verwahrung Halten dieser Verfügbarkeit)’[PIA 51/390]. Admittedly, Heidegger’s interpretation of the distinction betweenentelechia and energeia is ambiguous here but as the fifth chapter of this bookwill show, this reading of dunamis, along with the analysis of Zuhandenheitas such, will be radically transformed by a reflection on the origin of the workof art.

23. I return to this sense of energeia in the following chapter but cf., for example,On the Soul, III, 2, 426a 17 ff.

24. On the Soul, III, 8, 431b21. Cf. SZ 14.25. For an excellent rebuttal of the modern critiques of Aristotle as a naïve real-

ist cf. Owens, op. cit., p. 128 ff.26. Cf. G9 138/111.27. On the Parts of Animals, 687a21.28. Remi Brague, La Phénoménologie comme voie d’accès au monde grec, in

Phénoménologie et métaphysique, Presses Universitaires de France, 1984, eds J.L.Marion and G. Planty-Bonjour, p. 272. Robert Bernasconi (art. cit., pp. 112–13)writes equally well on this question: ‘it is not the task of so-called fundamen-tal ontology to offer a rival thesis to that which has been maintained by thetradition’ since ‘ancient ontology while harbouring this meaning, neverthe-less fails to articulate it and this is what constitutes, according to Heidegger,its naïveté.’ Yet it is nevertheless true – a fact that the author seems to bringinto question – ‘that with his analysis of the world Heidegger attempted totransfer to Zuhandenheit the priority traditionally accorded to Vorhandenheit’.

29. Michel Haar Le Chant de la Terre, L’Herne, Paris, 1987, pp. 51–2.30. Ibid., p. 162 and 48 for the two quotations.31. ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’, in Vorträge und Aufsätze, G7; ‘The Question

Concerning Technology’ in Basic Writings, trans. D.F. Krell, London: Routledge,1995.

32. Taminiaux presents the argument in the chapter of his Lectures de l’ontologiefondamentale entitled La Réappropriation de l’Ethique à Nicomaque.

Notes 201


33. Ibid. p. 169 and 171 for the two quotations.34. Jean Beaufret Entretiens avec Frederic de Towarnicki, Presses Universitaires de

France, Paris, 1984, pp. 15–16.35. Cf., in particular, ‘The Age of the World Picture’ in G5/QCT.36. Cf. SZ 358: ‘Reading off the measurements which result from an experiment

often requires a complicated “technical” set-up for the experimental design’.In his Le Principe d’Anarchie (Seuil, Paris, 1982) p. 25 Reiner Schürmann haswritten that there is here a ‘completely insufficient’ thinking of technology.Insufficient as it may be, it is necessary to understand how fundamental ontol-ogy constitutes the possibility of the later reflections on modern technology.

3 Time and Motion

1. Cf. The Postulates of Empirical Thought in Critique of Pure Reason [A 218–26;B 264–76] and the essay ‘What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made inGermany Since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?’, in Theoretical Philosophy after1781 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, eds. H. Allison and P. Heath,2002).

2. On this point see in addition G24 92/66.3. Cf. The Parologisms of Pure Reason in Critique of Pure Reason A 341–405,

B 399–432. For Heidegger’s discussion of the positive account of the being thatwe are inherent in Kant’s determination of moral personality cf. G24 185/131 ff.

4. Although it is not properly thematised until book V Aristotle uses the termmetabole three times in Physics I at 186a16, 191a7 and 191b33. I return to thesense of the term below.

5. Cf. 190b28.6. Physics II, 1, 193b20.7. In 1927 Heidegger writes: ‘the common Greek expression Rκστατικ�ν means

stepping-outside-self. It is affiliated with the term “existence” ’ [G24 377/267].8. Aubenque does not speak of The Introduction to Metaphysics by name but the

reference is clear. Cf. p. 433, n. 1 (op. cit.).9. Ibid., p. 437.

10. Cf. Physics V, I, 225a1: Πdσα μ,ταβολx Rστιυ Oκ τιυο� ,$� τι. Heidegger wouldappear to adopt the traditional reading of metabole as the most general con-cept of movement unreservedly. However, for a genetic reading that attemptsto isolate the particularity of becoming, movement and change in their individ-ual contexts in the Physics, see Lambros Couloubaritsis La Physique d’Aristote(Brussels: Ousia, 1997, 2nd edition).

11. Cf. Physics V, 2, 226b10–16.12. Cf. On the Soul, II, 5, 417b2–4 and L.A. Kosman, ‘Substance, Being and

Energeia’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 2, 1984, pp. 121–49.13. Criticisms of the ‘process-view’ date from Aristotle’s medieval commentators

but the contemporary debate stems largely from Aryeh Kosman’s ‘Aristotle’sdefinition of Motion’, in Aristotle: Critical Assessments, (Routledge, London,1999, ed. L.P. Gerson; first published in Phronesis 14, 1969, pp. 40–62) whichproposes a version of the ‘actuality-view’: given that the definition is supposedto yield the process rather than the result of movement, movement must beunderstood as an actual rather than a potential potentiality. The definition

202 Notes


implies in some sense a distinction between different modes of potentiality,between the potentiality of bricks to be formed as a house when they lie idlyin the builder’s yard and their potentiality when the house is in the processof being built For rebuttals of Kosman’s criticisms of the ‘process view’ and ofhis statement of the ‘actuality view’ see D.W. Graham’s ‘Aristotle’s definitionof motion’ in Aristotle: Critical Assessments (originally published in AncientPhilosophy 8, 1988, pp. 209–15) and J. Kostmann’s ‘Aristotle’s definition ofchange’ in History of Philosophy Quarterly, 4, 1987, pp. 3–16. For a recentinternational bibliography concerning the question of the definition see thefifth chapter of Couloubaritsis’ La Physique d’Aristote (op. cit.).

14. Aubenque, op. cit., p. 454.15. Aubenque, op. cit., pp. 442–3.16. In his ‘Heidegger’s Philosophy of Mind’ (in Contemporary Philosophy: A New

Survey, ed. Guttorm Folistad, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983, p. 307)Thomas Sheehan expresses well Heidegger’s reading of the very being of thebeing in movement for Aristotle:

But such relative absentiality is precisely what lets the entity be a movingentity. Therefore, to know a moving entity as what it truly is means tokeep present to mind not only the present entity but also the presence of theabsentiality that makes it a moving entity. The presence-of-its-absentialityis the moving entity’s Being-structure. We may call it ‘pres-ab-sentiality’.

The conclusion to the fifth chapter of the current book returns, however, tothe specifically verbal sense of presencing and absencing in this passage fromHeidegger’s essay on phusis.

17. As Macquarrie and Robinson note on p. 41 of their translation of Being andTime the verb ‘geschehen’ ordinarily means to ‘happen’. Yet, Heideggerstresses the etymological relation that it bears to ‘Geschichte’ or ‘history’ anduses it to denominate the historical existence of Dasein that is prior to historyin the sense of the work of historians.

18. In Margins of Philosophy (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Press, 1982 trans. AlanBass), p. 61.

19. Admittedly, Aristotle does not refer to his predecessors within the part of theexoteric discourse that concerns the question of whether time belongs tobeings or non-beings but it would seem difficult to hold that this aporetic isone that the Stagirite formulates simply from his own reflections.

20. This argument is the most intuitive but Aristotle does provide another: thenow is a limit, time is divisible into finite periods and each such period mustbe limited by at least two different ‘nows’ that form its beginning and end[218a21–5]. The ‘nows’ must, therefore, be different.

21. It should be noted that time, as pertaining to the enquiries concerning phu-sis, is already an object of esoteric or, to use the expression proper toAristotle, acroamatic concern. The Stagirite uses the expression iκροαματιχbin describing his writings and lectures destined first and foremost to the stu-dents at the Lyceum rather than to a general audience. On this point, see thefirst pages of J. Tricot’s introduction to his translation of the Metaphysics(Paris: Vrin, 1966).

22. Cf. Heidegger, G24 358/253–4: ‘Mental actions also come under the determi-nation of motion – motion taken broadly in the Aristotelian sense and not

Notes 203


necessarily as local motion. The actions are not intrinsically spatial but theypass over into one another, one changes into the other. In such a mentalaction we can stop and dwell on something. We may recall the passage in DeInterpretatione: !ιστησι J διbυοια [16b20], thinking stands still with some-thing. The mind too has the character of a moving thing’. I return to thequestion of the movement of the soul in the final section of this chapter.

23. Cf. 221b4–5.24. Cf. G24 356–7/252–3.25. Cf. 218a33 ff. Heidegger reads the question of the phusis of time in this way

in the lecture course of 1927. It has, however, been interpreted in a differentsense. Joseph Moreau – in L’espace et le temps selon Aristote (Padua: Antenare,1965) – holds the difference to be a difference between an ontological and amerely epistemological determination of time. This is a reading that JacquesDerrida repeats unreservedly in Ousia and Gramm[, but for a telling critiqueof it see Chapter 4 of Jacques Marcel Dubois’s Le temps et l’instant selon Aristote(Paris: De Brouwer, 1967).

26. Cf. 223a16–29.27. Cf. 223a29–b1.28. Cf. G24 343–4/243–4 and Ross, Aristotle’s Physics, Oxford University Press,

1936, p. 65.29. Cf. Ross Aristotle’s Physics (op. cit.), p. 122.30. Aubenque, op. cit, p. 437.31. Cf. G24 347/245.32. Cf. G24 372–3/26433. Cf., in addition, G24 368/260.34. Aubenque, op. cit, p. 466, n. 1.35. ‘Ousia and Gramm[’, op. cit., p. 262.

4 The Moment of Truth

1. Jacques Taminiaux, Lectures de l’ontologie fondamentale, p. 162.2. Cf. Critique of Pure Reason A58/B52 and SZ 215.3. Cf. Critique of Pure Reason A293/B350 and SZ 215.4. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen (Gesammelte Werke, Husserliana,

Vols. XVIII–XX). The first Investigation is to be found in volume XIX/1. I refer,after the backslash in the following references, to G. Findlay’s translationwhich has recently been reedited by Dermot Moran: Logical Investigations,Routledge, London, 2001.

5. LU 30/183.6. For Husserl’s analysis of the essence of indication see §2–4 of the First

Investigation.7. LU 62/206.8. Cf. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, trans. J. Cottingham, 1996), pp. 50–1.9. LU 67/210.

10. LU 46/191.11. See, in particular, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘On the Phenomenology of

Language’ in Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, trans. R.C. McCleary, 1964).

204 Notes


12. Jacques Derrida, La Voix et le Phénomène, Presses Universitaires de France,Paris, 1967.

13. Concerning Husserl’s determination of expression, in 1927 Heidegger writes:

[T]he sign-function of the written form with reference to the spoken formis altogether different from the sign-function of the spoken form with ref-erence to what is meant by it. A multiplicity of symbol-relations appearshere which are very hard to grasp in their elementary structure andrequire extensive investigations [G24 263/185–6].

In claiming that there is some kind of absolute distinction between the spo-ken and written word Heidegger may seem to be more Husserlian thanHusserl, an impression that would only be reinforced by the account of Redein §33 of Being and Time. For a discussion of the problem of the account ofRede in Being and Time in relation to the later Heidegger’s reflection on lan-guage see Ullrich Haase, ‘From Name to Metaphor … and Back’, Research inPhenomenology 26, 1996, 230–60.

14. Thus, as Heidegger continues: ‘we thus obtain a phenomenological interpre-tation of the old scholastic definition of truth’. For Heidegger’s reading ofHusserl’s determination of truth in the Logical Investigations see the whole of§6 of G20. For an extended discussion of this reading see the second chapterof Daniel O. Dahlstrom’s Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2001).

15. This definition of logos as such at 16b28 follows from the definition of theparticular species of language that is the noun at 16a27–9: ‘No sound is bynature a noun: it becomes one, becoming a symbol. Inarticulate noises show(δηλο8σ� ) something – for instance, those made by brute beasts. But nonoises of that kind are nouns.’

16. On this point see Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote, p. 109, andTzvetan Todorov, Théories du Symbole, Seuil, Paris, 1977, pp. 14–15. Todorovreminds us that it is significant that the term ‘sign’ does not appear in the ini-tial definition in the first line of the passage. Concerning σημαντικó� andσημ,"ον, the same ambiguity occurs in English when we talk about the sig-nificance of something – as in the preceding sentence – even when it is notin any immediate sense a sign.

17. Cf. G21 133: ‘Caufwiesend sehen lassen (Aussage) ist nur das Reden, darin dasEntdecken oder Verdecken die eigentliche Redeabsicht trägt und bestimmt’.

18. On Heidegger’s reading, the prefix apo simply means from the being itself.Cf. G21 133.

19. Pierre Aubenque, op. cit., p. 112.20. Cf. 1011b26: ‘This will be apparent if we first define truth and falsity. To say

that what is, is not, or that what is not is, is false; but to say that what is, is,and what is not is not, is true.’

21. That it is quite legitimate and natural is the argument of Aubenque, op. cit.,pp. 109–10.

22. Cf. 893b2 and 983b17.23. Cf. 993b20.24. Aristotle makes the same point concerning perception at 427b12 and

428a11.25. Cf., in addition, 429b15.

Notes 205


26. Cf. A. Schwegler, Aristoteles, Metaphysik, 4 Vols. 1846–7. Re-edited Frankfurt1960, Vol. 4, p. 186.

27. W. Jaeger, Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Metaphysik des Aristoteles(Berlin: Weidmann, 1912) p. 52.

28. Cf. Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ed. and com. D.W. Ross,1924) and The Works of Aristotle, Vol. VIII, Metaphysica (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1928).

29. On this point, see Owens, op. cit., p. 412.30. Ibid. p. 414.31. Cf. G21 160.32. Cf. the whole of §3 of Brentano’s text (op. cit.).33. Cf. 1139a8 ff.34. Cf. G19 45/29–30 in particular.35. Cf. G19 §7 and §§19–23 for Heidegger’s most extensive analysis of phronesis

and the whole first part of the lecture course for the analysis of the differentmodes of aletheuein.

36. Cf. PIA 43/383.37. Cf. 1104a9. For a comprehensive account of the etymological origins and

development of the term kairos in Greek thinking see §2 of Pierre Aubenque’sLa Prudence chez Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963).

38. It is on the basis of his earlier interpretations of the sense of kairos in St. Pauland primal Christianity that Heidegger returns to Aristotle in 1922 to locatein it a phenomenon of original temporality. On this point see Otto Pöggeler,‘Destruction and Moment’ (in Reading Heidegger From the Start: Essays in hisEarliest Thought, Albany: State University of New York Press, ed. T. Kisiel andJ. van Buren, 1994, pp. 137–58); Chapters 8 and 10 of John van Buren’s TheYoung Heidegger: Rumour of a Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1994); Chapter 4 of Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being andTime (op. cit.).

39. The whole of the Contributions to Philosophy [G65] articulates such adiscourse.

40. The term is that of Franco Volpi in his ‘Being and Time: A translation of theNicomachean Ethics?’ in Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in his EarliestThought, (Albany: State University of New York Press, ed. T. Kisiel and J. vanBuren, 1994, pp. 195–211, trans. John Protevi).

41. Again see §2 of Aubenque’s La Prudence chez Aristote (op. cit.).42. Taminiaux, Lectures de L’ontologie fondamentale, (Grenoble: Gerome Million,

1995) p. 166.

5 Art and the Earth

1. See §34 of Hegel’s Aesthetics Vol.1, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998,trans. T.M. Knox). Jacques Taminiaux offers an instructive and extensive com-parison of Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle, with reference to §32 of Being andTime, and the circularity of Hegel’s speculative approach to the work of art inhis ‘Heidegger et l’héritage de Hegel’ (in Recoupements, Brussels: Ousia, 1982).

2. Julian Young Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001) p. 49.

206 Notes


3. Cf. N1 126/N1107 ff.4. Maurice Blanchot L’espace littéraire, (Paris: Gallimard, 1955) p. 296.5. As Emmanuel Martineau points out [UK2 56] the description of the temple as

specifically a temple of Zeus in the second version of ‘The Origin’ is omittedin the third, which means, to be sure, that Heidegger by no means pretendsto describe an extant temple.

6. On this point see, in particular, the essay ‘Time and Being’: ‘Coming-to-presence (Anwesen) concerns us (geht uns an); presence (Anwesenheit) means:to come-to-stay-with-us (uns entgegenweilen)’ [ZSD 12]. It is to be noted, how-ever, that Heidegger here rethinks the very sense of Anwesenheit as a coming-to-presence, whereas in the 1930s, as I will show below, the question is oneof locating an Anwesung or presencing that is prior to any Anwesenheit under-stood as presence.

7. Heraclitus’s fragments are numbered according to their ordering by Diels andKranz in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker 7th edition (Berlin, 1954).

8. Cf. the essay Aletheia in G7/EGT. For Heidegger’s most extensive reading ofHeraclitus see Heraclitus, G55.

9. Cf., for example, Metaphysics Γ , 1, 1003a26–32.10. Cf. Metaphysics Α, Chapters 5–8 in particular.11. Cf. fragments 50 and 54 respectively.12. The Poetry of Michelangelo (bilingual edition), trans. and ed. J.M. Saslow, Yale

University Press, 1991, no. 151, p. 302.13. F.W. von Herrmann (Heideggers Philosophie der Kunst, Frankfurt am Main:

Vittorio Klostermann, 1994, p. 359) provides the following reference forDurer’s dictum: ‘Die Lehre von menschlicher Proportion’, in SchriftlicherNachlaß, 3 vols. ed. H. Rupprich, Berlin, 1969, p. 295.

14. Concerning the sense of the term ‘creation’, in his Die Entstehung desGeniebegriffs – Ein Beitrag zur Ideengeschichte der Antike und des Frühkapitalismus(Hildesheim/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1972. Originally published byJ.C.B. Mohr, Tübingen, 1926) Edgar Zilsel has shown that the use of the verb‘create’ to characterise artistic production, as opposed to divine creation, isstill only very rarely used in the Renaissance and, consequently, that when theartist becomes a creator this not only implies a certain slippage of the senseof creation itself but, and more significantly, an elevation of the artist – incomparison – to the position of God.

15. Cf. p. 128 of ‘Ne sutor ultra crepidam: Erasmus and Dürer at the hands ofPanofsky and Heidegger’ in Heidegger and The Art of Existing, New York:Humanities Press, 1993.

16. Erwin Panofsky Idea, trans. J. Peake, Columbia: University of South CarolinaPress, 1968.

17. The Poetry of Michelangelo, op. cit., poem no. 84.18. Zilsel, op. cit., p. 221.19. Cf. ibid. p. 220.20. Critique of the Power of Judgment, §43, p. 182.21. Ibid.22. Ibid., §46, p. 186. The remaining citations from Kant are to be found on this

or on the following page of the text.23. J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art (London: Polity, 1992) p. 101.24. Hegel, Aesthetics Vol. 1, p. 440.

Notes 207


25. In his article The Still Life as a Natural Object. A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh(in The Reach of Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein, Springer, New York,ed. Marianne L. Simmel, 1968) Meyer Schapiro holds the shoes in the paint-ing of which Heidegger speaks to be not those of a peasant woman but thoseof Van Gogh himself. In his La Vérité en Peinture (Flammarion, Paris, 1978)Jacques Derrida has rightly pointed to the naive and pre-critical nature ofSchapiro’s argument insofar as he holds the painting to be simply a represen-tation of some existent thing. Yet is Heidegger not guilty of the same naivetyinsofar as the ontic claim as to the painting showing a pair of peasant shoesis the condition of the ‘ontological’ argument that the painting makes theirbeing as reliable manifest? This is undecidable as there exists nothing to dis-qualify the claim that the shoes painted make manifest a pair of shoesbelonging to a peasant. Derrida has written of the ‘ridiculous and lamenta-ble’ (p. 334) nature of Heidegger’s reading as a ‘moment of pathetic collapse’(p. 299) yet these comments seem excessive.

26. Cf. ‘The Thing’ in G7/BW.27. Robert Bernasconi (‘The Greatness of the Work of Art’, in Heidegger towards

the Turn (Albany: State University of New York Press, ed. J. Risser, 1999) p. 101notes that this return to the Greeks ‘look as if it might threaten his[Heidegger’s] attempt to separate’ creation from production, yet without elab-orating this problem. Similarly, in his Heidegger. L’œuvre d’art comme péripétiede la pensée (in Phénoménologie et Esthétique, Encre Marine, Fougères, LaVersanne, 1998, p. 63) Holger Schmid notes briefly that the attempt to makethe distinction in returning to the Greek sense of techne ‘fails’ and that ‘a tensionremains until the end, bound to the implicit problem of Platonic–Aristotelianpoiesis’.

28. Cf. EM 113 ff. As Heidegger emphasises in the final version of ‘The Origin’,however, the shock of the new in the work of art ‘is in no way violent (hatnichts Gewaltsames)’ [UK3 54/40]. For an extended discussion of this changeof register see Chapter 2 of Daniel Payot’s La Statue de Heidegger, (Belfort:Circé, 1998).

29. On the manifold meanings of i6αgρ,σι� in Aristotle cf. Owens, op. cit.,pp. 382–5. On Dürer and Michelangelo’s inheritance of Neo-Platonism seeChapter VI of Panofsky’s Idea (op. cit.).

30. Aristotle, Physics, Harvard University Press, 1996, trans. Wicksteed andCornford, pp. 126–7.

31. Cf. Owens, op. cit. p. 162.32. For the doctrine of the four causes cf. Physics II, 3; Metaphysics, A, 1–10; 2

(which reproduces Physics II, 3); H, 4, 1044a–b; Z, 17; 7, 4; Second Analytics, II,11–12; On the Parts of Animals, I, 1.

33. H. Happ, Hyle. Studien zum aristotelischen Materie-Begriff, p. 296.34. Pierre Aubenque notes this; Aubenque, op. cit., p. 441, n. 1.35. For this argument, cf. Gilson, op. cit. p. 64.36. Beaufret ‘Energeia et Actus’, in Dialogue avec Heidegger I (op. cit.) p. 124.

Beaufret’s essay constitutes an essential supplement to Heidegger’s most exten-sive genealogy of the transformation of energeia as actuality in ‘Metaphysics asthe History of Being’ and ‘Science and Reflection’ in G7/QCT. For a widergenealogy of the movement from Greek to Latin thought see the lecture courseof the winter semester 1942–3 entitled Parmenides, G54.

208 Notes


37. This quotation is from Beaufret’s Leçons de Philosophie, Seuil, Paris, 1998,p. 126.

38. Zimmermann, op. cit., p. 163.39. Cf. WHD 53–4/22.40. Heidegger cites [G9 269/206] the phrase ‘Ο i, βασιλ,jων’, the ‘king for the

time being’, which, as Liddell and Scott note, is to be found in Herodotus.One can say that this use of i, is indicative of its original meaning becauseit is only on the basis of its being present at least for a while that somethingcan consequently be determined as eternal.

41. ‘We cannot assign what is to be thought as coming-to-presence to one of thethree dimensions of time, namely, as one might suppose, to the present. Theunity of the temporal dimensions rather rests in the play by which each isimplicated in the other (in dem Zuspiel jeder für jeder). This play shows itself aswhat properly plays in what is proper to time, and thus, in a certain sense, asa fourth dimension – in fact, not only in a certain sense, but in truth.Original (eigentliche) time is four-dimensional’ [ZSD 16].

42. Cf. Thomas Sheehan’s ‘On the Way to Ereignis: Heidegger’s Interpretation ofPhusis’, in Continental Philosophy in America (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UniversityPress, eds H.J. Silvermann, J. Sallis, and T.M. Seebohm, 1983a). The authorfocuses principally on the text of 1939

since Heidegger’s explications of dynamis, energeia and physis are generally(and I emphasise that word) constant from the early twenties up throughthe winter semester of 1951–2 and differ only in minor and generally con-textual ways from ‘Von Wesen und Begriff der Physis’.

Despite the reluctance to generalise, the author fails to recognise what hasoccurred within Heidegger’s thinking with a reflection on the work of art.

43. Sheehan, ‘On the Way to Ereignis’, p. 161.44. Schmid, Holger ‘Heidegger: L’œuvre d’art comme péripétie de la pensée’ in

Phénoménologie et Esthétique, Encre Marine, Fougères, 1998, p. 70.

6 Art, World and the Problem of Aesthetics

1. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, p. 102 and NI 100/N1 84.2. Cf. Critique of the Power of Judgment (op. cit.), §51, p. 199.3. For Heidegger’s critique of the modern concept of culture as an expression of

the modern metaphysics of subjectivity cf., in particular, ‘The Age of theWorld Picture’ in G5/QCT.

4. Cf. G56/57, §14, p. 73 and Kisiel, op.cit., p. 506.5. Cf. UK3 56/42.6. For Kant’s account of the symbol as a mode of Darstellung cf. §69 of the

Critique of the Power of Judgment and Jean Beaufret, ‘Kant et le problème deDarstellung’ in Dialogue avec Heidegger II (Paris: Editions de Minuit,1973). Onthe distinction between allegory and symbol in post-Kantian thinking seeTzvetan Todorov’s Théories du symbole (op. cit.), particularly chapter 6 entitledLa crise romantique.

7. F.W.J Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 5 (Munich: Biedersteen, ed. M. Schröter,1946), p. 407.

Notes 209


8. Ibid., p. 409.9. Ibid., pp. 400–1.

10. Ibid., p. 411.11. Schelling, op. cit., p. 410.12. On this point, cf. Todorov (op. cit.), p. 242 ff.13. For Kant, the symbolic is principally a mode of the presentation of rational

ideas, ideas that can otherwise gain no sensible presentation. Cf. §59 of theCritique of the Power of Judgment.

14. Ibid., §49, p. 192.15. In 1927, Heidegger had already decried the ambiguity inherent in the mod-

ern conceptions of the symbol within conceptions of language:

Today the symbol has become a favourite formula, but those who use iteither dispense with any investigation as to what is generally meant by itor else have no suspicion of the difficulties that are concealed in this ver-bal slogan [G24 263/186].

16. Hegel, Aesthetics p. 103.17. For a comparison of the account on the historical transformations of art that

is to be found in Heidegger’s Nietzsche (cf. NI 91/N1 77 ff.) to that of Hegel,see Jacques Taminiaux’s ‘Heidegger et l’héritage de Hegel’ in Recoupements(op. cit.).

18. Cf., in particular, §8–10 of the G34, Hölderlin’s Hymns: Germania and the Rhineand Michel Haar, op. cit., pp. 204–5.

19. Cf. R.M. Rilke, Werke (Leipzig, 1953), Vol. 2, pp. 39–41, trans. M.D. HerterNorton, Norton, New York, 1949, p. 46 ff.

20. I approach this question in a hypothetical manner since Merleau-Ponty willdevelop Husserl’s thinking of expression in delimiting any dualistic approachto the phenomenon of language and thus any literal sense of the termexpression itself. Cf., in particular, the chapter of The Phenomenology ofPerception (op. cit.) entitled The Body as Expression and Speech.

21. Françoise Dastur, ‘Heidegger’s Freiburg Version of the Origin’, in Heideggertowards the Turn (Albany: State University of New York Press, ed. J. Risser,1999a) p. 138.

22. Cf. SZ 133.23. For example, UK3 35/26: ‘The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to

surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth,however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world intoitself and keep it there.’

24. In this sense Heidegger will even go as far as to consider thought itself as ema-nating from the earth. Cf. the essay entitled Hebel: Friend of the House in G13and Alain Vuillot’s useful treatment of this question in his Heidegger et la Terre(L’Harmattan, Paris, 2000) p. 25.

25. On the etymology of the word Dichtung cf. G39 29:

It comes from the old high German tithôn, and is related to the Latindictare, which is a frequentative form of dicere, to say. Dictare, to say some-thing, to say it out loud, to ‘dictate’ it, to expose something in language,to edit it, whether this is an essay, a report, a dissertation, a complaint ora plea, a song or whatever one wants. All this is called dichten, to expose

210 Notes


in language. Only since the 18th century, the use of the word dichten hasbeen reserved for the composition of linguistic constructions that we call‘poetic (poetisch)’, that we call ‘poems (Dichtungen)’. In the beginning,Dichten does not have a privileged relation with the poetic.

26. Cf. UK3 62/46–7.27. Haar, op. cit., p. 191.28. Cf., in particular, the whole of §277 of G65.29. Cf. NI 93/N1 77 ff. for Heidegger’s delimitation of modern aesthetics.30. Cf., in particular, the introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment.31. Cf., ibid., §8 and 21.32. In his ‘The Greatness of the Work of Art’ (art. cit.) Robert Bernasconi has

attempted to locate a certain ‘rhetoric of greatness’ in Heidegger’s work indrawing a parallel between the idea of ‘great art’ and Heidegger’s infamousremark in the Introduction to Metaphysics concerning the ‘inner truth andgreatness’ [EM 152] of the National Socialist movement. One can, however,refuse this second conception of greatness in accepting the first.

33. Cf. the first page of Hegel’s Aesthetics.34. Cf. NI 95/N1 80 and Alain Boutot’s Heidegger et Platon, (Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France, 1987) for an extended discussion of Heidegger’sreading of Plato’s determination of art.

35. On this point, and for the interpretation of mimesis that has been presentedhere, cf. R. Dupont-Loc and J. Lallot’s introduction to their translation of thePoetics (Paris: Seuil, 1980).

36. Cf. ‘L’Enigme de Z’, Dialogue avec Heidegger IV, p. 30.37. Cf. NII 409/EP 30.

Notes 211


Bibliography

This bibliography refers only to the texts that I have cited or, less frequently, thathave influenced this study. Heidegger’s texts do not appear in it since they arefully referenced in the list of abbreviations at the beginning of the book.

1 Aristotle

1.1 Collected worksAristotelis opera (Berlin Academy edition, 5. vols., 1831–70). The first four volumes

were edited by E. Bekker whilst the fifth, which contains the Index Aristotelicus,is the work of H. Bonitz.

The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation (New Jersey:Princeton University Press, ed. J. Barnes, 1984).

1.2 Other editions, translations and commentariesAristotle’s Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ed., com., D.W. Ross, 2.

vols., 1924). Aristotle’s Metaphysics Z and H (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ed., com.,trans. David Bostock, 1994).

Aristotle’s Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ed., com., D.W. Ross, 1936).Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics (London: Loeb, trans. H. Cooke and

H. Tredennick, 1938).Generation of Animals (London: Loeb, trans. A. Peck, 1942).Metaphysica. The Works of Aristotle, Vol. 8, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, trans. D.W. Ross,

Oxford, 1928).Metaphysics (London: Loeb, trans. H. Tredennick, 2. vols., 1933 and 1935).La Métaphysique (Paris: Vrin, trans. J. Tricot, 2. vols., 1966).Nicomachean Ethics (London: Loeb, trans. H. Rackham, 1926).On Generation and Corruption and On Sophistical Refutations (London: Loeb, trans.

E.S. Forster, 1955).On the Parts of Animals (London: Loeb, trans. A. Peck and E. Forster, 1937).On the Soul (London: Loeb, trans. W.S. Hett, 1936).Physics (London: Loeb, trans. P. Wicksteed and F. Cornford, 2. vols., 1929 1934).Posterior Analytics & Topica (London: Loeb, trans. H. Tredennick and E.S. Foster,

1960). Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ed., com., D.W. Lucas, OxfordUniversity Press, 1968).

Poetics (London: Loeb, trans. S. Halliwell, W. Fyfe and D. Innes, Loeb, 1927).La Poétique (Paris: Seuil, trans. R. Dupont-Roc and J. Lallot, 1980).Rhetoric (London: Loeb, trans. J.H. Freese, 1926).

1.3 StudiesAubenque, P., La prudence chez Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,

1962).

212


——, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,1966, 2nd edn).

Boehm, R., Das Grundlegende und das Wesentliche (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,1965).

Bostock, D., ‘Aristotle’s Account of Time’, in Aristotle: Critical Assessments(London: Routledge, ed. L.P. Gerson, 1999 – originally published in Phronesis,25 (1980): 148–69).

Brentano, F., Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (Freiburgim Breisgau: Herder, 1862); On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle (Berkeley:California University Press, trans. R. George, 1975).

Code, A., ‘The Persistence of Aristotelian Matter’, in Aristotle: Critical Assessments(Routledge: London, ed. L. P. Gerson, 1999 – originally published in PhilosophicalStudies, 29 (1976): 357–67).

Couloubaritsis, L., La physique d’Aristote, (Brussels: Ousia, 1997, 2nd edn).Dubois, J.M., Le temps et l’instant selon Aristote (Paris: De Brouwer, 1967).Gill, M.L., Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity (New Jersey: Princeton

University Press, 1989).Gilson, E. L’etre et L’essence (Paris: Vrin, 2000).Graham, D. Aristotle’s Two Systems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987a).—— ‘The paradox of prime matter’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 25 (1987b):

475–90.—— ‘Aristotle’s Definition of Motion’, in Aristotle: Critical Assessments (London:

Routledge, ed. L.P. Gerson, 1999 – originally published in Ancient Philosophy, 8(1988): 209–15).

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Phénoménologie et métaphysique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, eds J.L. Marion and G. Planty-Bonjour, 1984).

Buren, J. van, The Young Heidegger: Rumour of a Hidden King (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1994).

Courtine, J.F., Note complémentaire pour l’histoire du vocabulaire de l’être’, inConcepts et Catégories dans la Pensée Antique (Paris: Vrin, ed. P. Aubenque, 1980).

—— Heidegger et la Phénoménologie (Paris: Vrin, 1990).Dahlstrom, D., Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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F. Raffoul and D. Pettigrew, 1999b).Derrida, J., La Voix et le Phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967).—— La Vérité en Peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978).—— ‘Ousia and Gramm[’, in Margins of Philosophy (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester

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(Paris: Flammarion, 1987) pp. 173–222.Dreyfus, H., ‘Heidegger’s History of the Being of Equipment’, in Heidegger: A

Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) pp. 173–85. Fried, G., ‘What’s in aWord?’, in A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven:Yale University Press, eds R. Polt and G. Fried, 2001) pp. 125–42.

Haar, M., Le Chant de la Terre (Paris: L’Herne, 1988).Haase, U., ‘From name to metaphor … and back’, Research in Phenomenology, 26

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dimensional time’, Research in Phenomenology, 29 (1999): 146–214. Kisiel, T., The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: California University

Press, 1993).Kockelmans, J., Heidegger on Art and Art Works (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer,

1985).Marx, W., Heidegger and the Tradition (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,

trans. T. Kisiel and M. Greene, 1971).McNeill, W., The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle and the Ends of Theory

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).Milet, J.P., L’Absolu Technique (Paris: Kimé, 2000).Moran, D., ‘Destruction of the Destruction: Heidegger’s Versions of the History of

Philosophy’, in Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art and Technology (New York: Holmes &Meier, eds. Hames, K. and C. Jamme, 1994) pp. 295–318.

—— ‘Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s and Brentano’s accounts of intentionality’Inquiry, 43, 1 (2000a): 39–65.

——, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000b).O’Murchadha, F., Zeit des Handelns und Möglichkeit der Verwandlung (Würzburg:

Königshausen & Neumann, 1999).Pattison, G., The Later Heidegger (London: Routledge, 2000).Payot, D., La Statue de Heidegger (Belfort: Circé, 1998).Pöggeler, O., ‘Destruction and Moment’, in Reading Heidegger From the Start

(Albany: State University of New York Press, eds. Kisiel, T. and U. van Buren,1994) pp. 137–58.

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1930s (Albany: State University of New York Press, ed. U. Risser, 1999) pp. 14–30.Schapiro, M., ‘The Still Life as a Natural Object. A Note on Heidegger and Van

Gogh’, in The Reach of Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein (New York:Springer , ed. M.L. Simmel, 1968).

Schürmann, R., Le Principe d’Anarchie (Paris: Seuil, 1982).Schmidt, H., ‘Heidegger. L’œuvre d’art comme péripétie de la pensée’, in

Phénoménologie et Esthétique (Fougères: Encre Marine, 1998).Schrag, C., ‘The Transvaluation of Aesthetics and the Work of Art’, in Thinking

about Being: Aspects of Heidegger’s Thought (Oaklahoma University Press, eds. R. Shahan and J. Mohanty, 1984) pp. 62–85.

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Index

actuality, (energeia/entelechia), 41, 42,43–46, 68–69, 78, 87–93, 149,167, 177, 193–194

aesthetics (meaning of), 140, 185–187aletheia, 46, 125, 161–162, 164Antiphon, 164architecture, 170–171Aristotle

Categories, 27–29, 37, 42De Anima, 45, 80Metaphysics, 20–46, 88–90, 121–126,

152, 157Nicomachean Ethics, 65–67, 127–131,

132On Interpretation, 118–121, 124Physics, 4, 23, 30, 34–35, 82–95, 99–110Poetics, 189–191The Generation of Animals, 159

Aubenque, P., 40, 85, 92, 105–106,110–111, 121, 132

Beaufret, J., 74, 76, 161, 162, 191beautiful, 171, 184–188Bernasconi, R., 147birth-certificate (of metaphysics), 5–9,

32, 62, 64, 136Boehm, R., 27Bostock, D., 30Brague, R., 70–71Brentano, F.

on Aristotle, 44, 126on intentionality, 51, 54

categories(in Heidegger’s sense), 58, 61, 79see also Aristotle Categories

Courtine, J-F., 65

Dastur, F., 181death, 98Derrida, J., 98–99, 110, 115Destruction (phenomenological), 3–8,

11, 48, 76–77, 112–121, 132

dismantling return (abbauenderRückgang), 11, 13, 112, 132

Dreyfus, H., 47–48, 71Dürer, A., 146–147

ekstasis, 85, 131existence (meaning of), 41, 62–63,

72–73, 78, 85Existenz, 58, 78–80, 180

fundamental ontology (meaning of),7–10, 70–75

Gilson, E., 30, 37, 41

Haar, M., 47, 70, 149, 185Happ, H., 160Hegel, G.W.F.

on artistic creation, 150on the death of art, 177, 187

Heidegger, M.Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 7,

62, 67, 69, 79, 101, 107–108,131–132, 179

Being and Time, 2–11, 13, 21, 39,47–62, 65–66, 70–77, 81, 96–99,106, 112–117, 122, 126, 130–132

Fundamental Concepts of Aristotle’sPhilosophy, 67, 68, 69

History of the Concept of Time, 56–57Introduction to Metaphysics, 85,

144–145, 156–157Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 11–13, 44

Heraclitus, 4, 69, 144–145, 161hermeneutics

as-structure, 114, 117, 126hermeneutic circle and art-theory,

139hermeneutic concepts in artistic

presentation, 178hule, 30–37, 158–163

prote hule (primary matter), 30, 35see also matter

218


Husserl, E.on intentionality, 54on expression, 114

intentionality, 50–59, 116, 172see also Husserl

Jaeger, W., 41

Kahn, C. H., 25Kant, I.

on the origin of philosophicalconcepts, 5

on matter and form, 32on possibility, 78on the forms of intuition, 102on truth, 112on disinterestedness, 140on genius, 149on architecture, 171on Darstellung or presentation, 174on the beautiful, 186

logos, 29, 117–122, 166, 180, 190

Marc, F., 178matter, 30–37, 56, 68, 87–88metaphysics (meaning of), 4, 9–10,

14, 22, 71as onto-theology, 27

Michelangelo, 146–150movement, 4, 40, 80–98, 102–103,

106–110, 127–128, 132, 159–160of Heidegger’s own work, 10–11,

51–58, 68, 72, 135, 142, 154,194–195

ontology (meaning of), 20–22see also fundamental ontology

Owens, J., 20, 24, 25, 41

painting, 177–178Aristotle’s conception of painting,

188–189Panofsky, E., 147Parmenides, 4, 83phusis, 23, 76, 77, 81, 82, 86–88,

93–95, 144–145, 156, 157Plato

and the origin of philosophy, 2–4

and ousia, 23–24and the idea/eidos, 29, 33, 34and the fall of philosophy, 145, 149on inspiration, 149–150on the beautiful, 186on art and truth, 188

poiesis, 12, 13, 14, 66, 73, 89, 127,139, 155–161, 163, 184, 190, 194

poetry, 120, 141, 150, 174, 179–180,188

possibility, 45–46, 68, 78–79, 86–93,126, 147, 150, 157–161, 166, 193

reduction (in Heidegger’sphenomenological sense), 7–8,10, 47, 71–72

Rilke, R.M., 179Ross, D., 38

Sadler, T., 13, 14, 15science

philosophy as science, 22modern natural sciences, 56, 74,

143existential conception of science,

74–76Sheehan, T., 166subject (to hupokeimenon), 27–41,

84–85, 94, 104, 159substance, 24, 26–29, 38–41, 43, 46,

58, 80, 97, 164

Taminiaux, J., 72–73, 132techne, 31–33, 49, 78, 87, 127–128,

155–161truth, 12, 34, 42, 43, 44, 45, 75,

111–134, 191, 194see also aletheia

Vorhandenheit (sense of), 54, 56, 58,60, 61–63, 64, 65, 68, 74–76, 141,153, 155

Young, J., 140

Zilsel, E., 148Zimmermann, M., 47–48, 163Zuhandenheit (sense of), 54, 58–60, 64,

65, 67–69, 72, 74, 78, 95, 113,126, 136, 153–155, 175

Index 219


Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art

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