Being means being-produced and, as having been produced, being of significance relative to certain tendencies to have dealings with it, i.e., being-available for them. Insofar as they are objects of circumspection or indeed of that kind of understanding that in its autonomy simply looks at them, beings are addressed with respect to the way they look (εἶδος [idea, form]). The understanding that simply looks at beings explicates itself by addressing and discussing (λέγειν) these beings. The “what” of these objects that is addressed (λόγος [discourse]) and their look (εἶδος) are in a sense the same. And this means that what is addressed in λόγος makes up as such these beings in the authentic sense. With the objects it addresses, λέγειν takes beings in the beingness (οὐσία [substance]) of their look into true safekeeping. But in Aristotle and also after him, οὐσία still retains its original meaning of the household, property, what is at one’s disposal for use in one’s environing world. Οὐσία means possessions, what one has [die Habe]. What it is in beings which, as their being, comes into the true safekeeping that deals with them, i.e., what allows them to be characterized as possessions, is their being-produced. It is in production that the objects of dealings first appear and come to look the way they do.
The domain of being consisting of objects of dealings (ποιούμενον [what has been produced], πρᾶγμα [a thing done], ἔργον [a work], κινήσεως [what has been set in motion]) and the mode of addressing these objects in such dealings, namely, a particular “logos” or more precisely the objects of such dealings in the how of their being-addressed, mark out the forehaving from which Aristotle drew the basic ontological structures and also the modes of addressing and defining for approaching the object “human life.”
How did these ontological structures arise? As the explicata of a defining that looks at [hinsehend] . . . and addresses . . . , that is, insofar as they grew out of Aristotle’s having moved along a certain path of research in which, adopting particular points of view [Hinsichten], he took up and articulated the domain of being that had been brought into forehaving through a founding experience of it. In other words, those researches in which objects were experienced and thought in their basic character of being-moved and something like motion also was initially seen to be given in these objects must provide the possibility of gaining access to the authentic motivational source of Aristotle’s ontology. It is in Aristotle’s Physics that we find this sort of research. In the method of interpreting it, this research needs to be treated as a phenomenon in toto and interpreted with respect to its object in the how of the investigative dealings with it, the founding experience in which this object was initially given as the starting point of research, the constitutive movements that actualize this research, and the concrete modes of thinking the object and conceptually articulating it. What becomes visible in this way are beings in motion with regard to the basic character of their being, movement with regard to its categorial structure, and thereby the ontological constitution of the archontic sense of being. For a phenomenological interpretation of this research, we also need to gain an understanding of the sense in which Aristotle generally understood research and the way it is pursued