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Aristotle’s Physics. Our interpretation needs to bring to light the following things right within the phenomenal movement of this research: the founding experience at work in it, i.e., the way its object has initially been given (κινούμενον [what is moving]); the points of view into which the object has been placed; and the explicata having grown out of the analysis that looks at the object from these points of view.

The above research is characterized as ἀρχή-research, i.e., it has to bring into true safekeeping the “from-out-of-whiches” and “from-the-points-of-view-of-which” (ἀρχαί) on the basis of which the κινούμενον comes to be seen. But if these ἀρχαί are to be capable of achieving what they are supposed to in accord with their sense, they themselves must be drawn from the phenomenal content of the objects in question. The ἀρχαί of beings are not there for those concerned dealings and their circumspection in which one goes about gearing beings in certain directions. This concern and apprehension lives within other points of view, namely, within those directed to the immediately encountered world of its dealings. Within the scope of going about dealings in the concern of factical life, the “from-out-of-whiches” of beings are as such concealed. The primordial sense of the “concept of truth” proves to be at work in Phys. A 1 and indeed in Aristotle’s initial approach to the problem of research in physics.

Ἀρχή-research is research into the question of access. As such, (1) it has to secure its forehaving, i.e., its thematic domain of objects in the how of the basic phenomenal character of their content, and (2) it has to work out its foreconception, i.e., supply the points of view in which the actualization of its explication of its domain of being is supposed to maintain itself. The initial approach of this research is critique and more precisely fundamental critique concerned with principles. Aristotle’s interpretation makes clear why such research into the question of access must necessarily take a critical approach: namely, because all research moves within a particular level of some pregiven interpretation of life and within certain pregiven ways of discussing the world. What is still there and at work in the facticity of Aristotle’s own research is the how in which the “ancient physicists” had already seen, addressed, and discussed “nature.”

Accordingly, the critical question Aristotle’s ἀρχή-research poses to former times runs as follows: Were those beings that were thought of as φύσις [nature] brought into the forehaving of research in such a way that their decisive phenomenal character, namely, motion (a character previous research always also had in mind in one way or another when it addressed beings in the ways it did), was taken into true safekeeping and explicated in a primordial manner? Or was the way traditional research sought to gain access to the domain of being in question such that this research moved from the outset within “theories” and thematic principles that not only were not drawn this domain of being itself but blocked almost all access to it?

The sense of Aristotle’s critical stance consists in posing this question. His critique is positive in a distinctive sense, and it is based explicitly on a decisive


Martin Heidegger - Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond