able to define the object in a fitting manner only when one first sees it in overprecise terms (not arbitrarily but on the basis of access to the content in it one defines) and then manages, by a retraction of this overprecise elucidation, to arrive at a demarcation of the object that is as fitting as possible to it. An object that is always seen only in semi-darkness can be correctly understood in its semi-dark givenness only by a detour passing through an overly clear elucidation of it. However, insofar as it does elucidate in overprecise terms, interpretation should not question too broadly and claim for itself an utterly fantastic kind of objectivity in historical knowledge, as if it could eventually meet up with an “in-itself.” Merely inquiring into such a thing in any sense whatsoever means that one has misunderstood the basic character of the object of history. Inferring relativism and skeptical historicism from the fact that an “in-itself ” cannot be found is only the flip side of the same misunderstanding. The translation of interpreted texts and above all the translation of their decisive basic concepts is something that has grown out of the concrete interpretation of them and contains it, so to speak, in nuce [in a nutshell]. Coinages employed in translations do not spring from an obsession with innovation but rather from the content of the translated texts.
We now need to clarify the basic approach we will be taking in our interpretation of Aristotle, an approach determined by our above-sketched initial position. We will at the same time provide a summary sketch of the first part of our investigations.
The question that must guide our interpretation of Aristotle is: As what kind of object, with what kind of characteristics of being, was human being, i.e., “being in life,” experienced and interpreted? What is the sense of Dasein in terms of which Aristotle’s interpretation of life initially approached human being as an object? In short, in what kind of forehaving of being did this object stand? Further, how was this being of the human being explicated in concepts, out of what soil did this explication arise as a phenomenon, and which categories of being grew out of what was viewed in this manner as its explicata?
Was the sense of being Aristotle employed to define the being of human life drawn in a genuine manner from a simple, founding experience of this object only and its being, or was human life understood as only one being within a more comprehensive domain of being, i.e., did Aristotle apply to it a sense of being that he took to be archontic for investigating it? What did being in any sense whatsoever really mean for Aristotle? How was it able to be accessed, grasped, and defined? The domain of objects supplying the primordial sense of being was the domain of those objects produced and put into use in dealings. Thus the toward-which this primordial experience of being aimed at was not the domain of being consisting of things in the sense of objects understood in a theoretical manner as facts but rather the world encountered in going about dealings that produce, direct themselves to routine tasks, and use. What is amounts to what has been finished and made ready in the movement of going about the dealings of production (ποίησις), i.e., what has come into a being-on-hand and is now available for certain tendencies to use it.