143
PHENOMENOLOGICAL INTERPRETATIONS

as such. It is shown that under the headings of τύχη [chance], αὐτόματον [spontaneity] (terms utterly untranslatable when it comes to their authentic meaning), Aristotle ontologically explicates the “historical” movement of factical life, i.e., the movement of “what happens and can happen in such and such a way to someone everyday” [ibid., B 8, 198b36]. These ontological analyses have to this day not only remained unsurpassed but have not even been understood and utilized for what they are. They have been treated as an awkward and no longer usable supplement to the definition of the “real causes,” though these causes themselves clearly bear witness to the fact that they are conditioned by a particular approach to the problems in question.

In Book Three, Aristotle initiates his properly thematic analysis of the phenomenon of motion. Our interpretation (of Chapters 1–3 above all), which must contend with almost insurmountable textual difficulties (Simplicius [395, 20]18 complained about this early on), can really only be laid out when we work through the concrete contexts of this book. What is decisive for Aristotle is to show that the phenomenon of motion cannot be understood in a fundamental, categorial manner by using the traditional categories of “being” and “non-being” (“being-different,” “being-unequal”) [ibid., Γ 2, 201b21] that had until that time been made available in ontology. The phenomenon of motion provides of itself the structures that are primordial and ultimate in it: namely, δύναμις [potentiality], i.e., the in each case particular availability of . . . ; ἐνέργεια [actuality], i.e., the putting to work of this availability; and ἐντελέχεια [the fulfillment in which something has reached its end], i.e., the maintaining (in true safekeeping) of this availability that has been put to work.


The second part of our investigations is focused on an interpretation of Met. Z, H and Q. What is shown here is how Aristotle develops the fundamental problem of beingness through a specifically executed explication of what is addressed in a particular manner in λόγος as such (and in terms of the forehaving at work here, this λόγος is at the same time the look of something being moved in some way, i.e., of something having arisen from motion [κίνησις— ποίησις—πρᾶξις]), as well as how, on the basis of this, he arrives at an ontological formulation of the “categories” of δύναμις and ἐνέργεια, which are, along with his categories in the narrower sense, constitutive for the being “of beings.”

Aristotle’s “ethics” is then to be placed into this ontological horizon, so that this “ethics” is seen as the explication of beings in the sense of human beings, i.e., human life and its movement. This is done in such a way that we first provide an interpretation of De anima with respect to its ontological and logical structure, and indeed this itself is carried out on the broader basis of an explication of the domain of the being of life as a particular kind of movement (i.e., on the basis of an interpretation of De motu animalium). What is shown here is how “intentionality” comes into view for Aristotle and indeed as “objective,” i.e., as a how of the movement of life that is somehow “noetically” illuminated when it goes


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