turning points of history. This is accomplished through an originary return to their sources. Though the source is never an “in itself” that is captured, so that Aristotle’s philosophy could no more capture this origin than could that of his followers, Heidegger considers the turning of Aristotle’s thinking to be especially crucial.³⁹ This is certainly, at least in part, because of Aristotle’s peculiarly phenomenological bent. The fact that Heidegger looked to Aristotle for help in clarifying the many ways of being and knowing that found the possibility of hermeneutic phenomenology complicates the traditional explanation of Heidegger’s destruction as a critical movement back through the history of philosophy in order to overcome it. In the case of Aristotle at least, Heidegger discovers that the very future of philosophical thinking has already been prepared for but covered over by the scholasticism of the tradition.

One of the clearest indications of the legitimacy of efforts that have been undertaken to show the link between the genesis of Being and Time and Heidegger’s work on Aristotle is found in this manuscript where Heidegger announces that the question he is asking as he approaches Aristotle’s texts is the question of the being of human being.⁴⁰ He makes clear that his projected reading of Aristotle is to be a Daseinsanalytik, a questioning about the being who experiences and interprets being. His aim in reading Aristotle is to uncover “der Sinn von Dasein,” the various “categories” that constitute the way of being that in some manner always already is in relationship to being. It is indeed fascinating and informative that so many of the sections of Being and Time were already so cogently and compactly presented here in outline form. Already in place in 1922 was much of the philosophical vocabulary of Being and Time, words like Sorge, Besorgen, Umwelt, Umgang, Umsicht, Bedeutsamkeit, and so on. This is the text in which Heidegger begins to speak of the notion of Verfallen,⁴¹ not as an objective event that happens to one but as an “intentional how,” a way of being directed toward life that constitutes an element of facticity and is the basic character of the movement of caring. What are not so clearly fixed in these pages are the strategy and divisions of Being and Time. Themes like death, the averageness of das Man, individual existence as possibility, truth as unconcealing wrestling from concealment (a notion of truth, as we will see, that Heidegger attributes to Aristotle), the tendency of life to drift away from itself in fallenness—these themes are not so clearly divided in these pages as they are in Being and Time. In some regards, in reading this essay, one gets a better sense of the interdependence of each of the parts of Being and Time.