M. Heidegger (2002). “Phenomenological Interpretations in
Connection with Aristotle,” in Supplements,
J. Van Buren, ed.
M. Heidegger (1997). Plato’s
Sophist. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer
trans.
M. Heidegger (2002). The
Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy. T. Sadler, trans.
M. Heidegger (1995). Aristotle’s
Metaphysics Θ 1-3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force. W. Brogan
and P. Warnek, trans.
M. Heidegger (1959). An
Introduction to Metaphysics. R. Manheim, trans.
M. Heidegger (1994). Basic
Questions of Philosophy. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer trans.
M. Heidegger (1998). “On the Essence and Concept of physis in Aristotle’s Physics B, I,” in Pathmarks. W. McNeill, ed.
M. Heidegger (1998). “On the Question of Being,” in Pathmarks. W. McNeill, ed.
___________________________________________________________________
S
…if relying upon its own resources and not looking to the
hustle an bustle of worldviews, it has radically and clearly resolved to throw
factical life back on itself as this is possible in this factical life itself
and to let it fend for itself in terms of its own factical possibilities, i.e.,
if philosophy is in principle atheistic
and understands such about itself…” (121)
AM
“We must first of all recapture for ourselves the self-evident as something worthy of question” (68).
“Wonder is, however, the overcoming of the self-evident” (69).
“…to philosophize is always nothing other than the greatest presumption ventured by human Dasein given over to itself” (69).
“…this monstrous task…” (69)
“Not only did the Greeks, Plato and Aristotle, carry out the interpretation of this phenomenon of production, but the basic concepts of philosophy have grown out of and within this interpretation” ((117)
“So we willingly admit that what we are doing here is historically false, that is, false according to the judgment of professional historians of philosophy” (120).
BQP
“Thus the original and genuine relation to the beginning is the revolutionary, which, through the upheaval of the habitual, once again liberates the hidden law of the beginning. Hence the conservative does not preserve the beginning—it does not even reach the beginning. For the conservative attitude transforms what has already become into the regular and the ideal, which is then sought ever anew in historiographical considerations” (35).
“The future is the origin of history. What is most futural, however, is the great beginning….Revolution, the upheaval of what is habitual, is the genuine relation to the beginning” (38).
QB
“Reason and its representational activity are only one kind of thinking and are by no means self-determined…./// What is most thought-provoking, however, is the way in which rationalism and irrationalism become equally entwined in a reciprocal exchange from which they not only are unable to extricate themselves, but from which they no longer wish to escape. Thus, one denies any possibility that thinking might be brought before a call that maintains itself outside of the alternative of rational and irrational. Such a thinking could nonetheless be prepared by the tentative steps attempted in the manner of historical elucidation, reflection, and discussion” (293-294).
“But the question
concerning the essence of being dies off if it does not relinquish the language
of metaphysics, because metaphysical representation prevents us from thinking
the question concerning the essence of being” (306).
AM
“We who are of the modern age are not yet at all prepared for an effective interpretation…” (55)
AP
“Sometimes it seems as if modern humanity is rushing
headlong toward this goal of producing
itself technologically. If humanity achieves this, it will have exploded
itself, i.e., its essence qua subjectivity, into thin air, into a
region where the absolutely meaningless is valued as the one and only ‘meaning’
and where preserving this value appears as the human ‘domination’ of the globe”
(197).
S
“Factical Dasein always is what it is only as one's own Dasein and never as the Dasein in general of some universal humanity. Expending care on the latter could only ever be an illusory task” (114).
S
The “phenomenological destruction” requires “a primordial regress to the relevant sources….One can bring off this task only if a concrete interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy taking its orientation from the problem of facticity, i.e., from a radical phenomenological anthropology, has been made available….Beings in the how of their being-moved became the central phenomenon for Aristotle, and the explication of this phenomenon was the main topic of his physics” (126).
“What did being in any sense whatsoever really mean for Aristotle? How is 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” (127).
In his introduction to the German edition of this lecture,
Gadamer says that Heidegger's questions about human being "in der aristotelischen Metaphysik seine umfassende ontologische Antwort fand" (13). See Martin
Heidegger, Interpretations
Phenomenologiques d’Aristote Precede de Hans-Georg Gadamer, Un Ecrit
‘Theologique’ de Jeunesse Mauvezin,
Trans-Europ-Repress, 1992.
EHF
“…Book theta, which itself is the centre of the entire Metaphysics” (75).
AM
“Thus it is necessary to surpass Aristotle—not in a forward direction in the sense of a progression, but rather backwards in the direction of a more original unveiling of what is comprehended by him” (69).
“With Aristotle the greatest philosophical knowledge of antiquity is expressed, a knowledge which even today remains unappreciated and misunderstood in philosophy” (188)
AP
“Aristotle’s Physics is the hidden, and therefore never adequately studied, foundational book of Western philosophy” (185).
“It would be presumptuous to try to capture in a few sentences an essential insight into Aristotle’s interpretation of movedness, the most difficult thing Western metaphysics has had to ponder in the course of its history” (216).
S
Phronesis unveils being in a way that calls forth action that have not yet occurred. This “not yet such and such” is “already such and such….This ‘not-yet’ and this ‘already’ need to be understood in their ‘unity,’ i.e., on the basis of an original givenness, with reference to which they are particular explicata. We say ‘particular’ because here the objects in question are placed under determinates aspects of movement. The concept of steresis [privation] is the category of the above-mentioned explicata. It is in this category that Hegelian dialectic is rooted within intellectual history” (135).
EHF
“…where Western metaphysics attains its genuine fulfillment,
i.e. where the basic approach of Greek philosophy, together with the essential
motives /// of subsequent philosophical questioning, are brought to a full and
unified presentation, with Hegel”
(76-77).
and Dasein
S
“The object of philosophical research is human Dasein insofar as it is interrogated with respect to the character of its being. This basic direction of philosophical questioning is not externally added and attached to the interrogated object, factical life. Rather it needs to be understood as an explicit taking up of a basic movement of factical life. In this movement, life is in such a way that in the concrete temporalizing of its being, it is anxiously concerned about its being, even when it goes out of its way to avoid itself” (113).
and care
S
“The basic sense of the movement of factical life is caring (curare). Life’s ‘being out for something’ in which it is directed toward and cares about it is such that the toward-which of this care, namely, its historically particular world, also is there. The movement of caring is characterized by the fact that factical life goes about its dealings with the world” (115).
“In the three characteristics of its motion, namely, being tempting, tranquilizing, and alienating, the tendency toward falling is the basic movement…” of Dasein (118).
and eros
AM
“Whatever is striven after, the orekton, is not itself a mere object that is represented but one that moves; it is this as legomenon eidos. (The same fundamental connection of kinesis and orekton is found in the concluding book of the Physics.….(Eros is characteristic of a specifically Platonic way of seeing the living kind of movement, which recurs in Aristotle in a modified form.) The arche, that from out of which everything living is set into motion, is thus had and held by the soul (arche echomene), and in fact in various relations, to be delineated through the phenomena eidos, telos, orekton, and logos. These define one and the same arche back upon which the whole occurrence and inner constitution of dynamis is referred” (131).
as transition, genesis
AM
“We, too, could interpret both cases, as Aristotle observed, as things going toward their place. (A possible explanation of nature which until today is not in the least refuted, in fact not even grasped)” (67).
Metabole “must be taken in the meaning which it primarily has in Greek: to transpose or to shift, for example, to shift the sail, to transpose goods, thus in an ‘active’ sense” (72).
“…as transition, that is, as kinesis” (180).
“The transition belongs to the phenomena as that through which they must have gone or else will go, each in its differing way. Being capable of something is in its ownmost actuality co-determined through this phenomenon of transition” (181).
“The brushing aside of the difference between dynamis and energeia is in itself the brushing aside of kinesis. This can be the case only if just these two are essentially related to kinesis, even while their differences must be observed. If kinesis is rescued, then the difference between dynamis and energeia is secured as well” (183).
EHF
“A third principle belongs to the inner possibility of the genesis…: the hypomenon, i.e. what stays the same throughout the change. But this, the chalk, a singular thing, has a twofold eidos: first its being-chalk, which does not necessarily involve being-white, and secondly this being-white itself. These must be different if change is to be possible, namely change as a going-over to something different to and absent from the initial state, steresis. So genesis in the proper sense involves these three principles: 1.l hypomenon, 2. eidos, 3. steresis. 2 and 3 refer to the enantia….Thus three archai: on the one hand hypomenon, on the other and the indicated /// opposition which itself consists of two principles” (41-42).
AP
“It indicates that Aristotle understands kinesis, movedness, in a very broad sense…” (190)
Movement in space, kinesis kata topon, “is for Aristotle only one kind of movedness among others, but it in no way counts as movement pure and simple” (190).
“But the essential core of what the Greeks meant in thinking metabole is attained only by observing that in a change something heretofore hidden and absent comes into appearance….for the Greeks movement as a mode of being has the character of emerging into presencing” (191).
as entelechy
AP
“But for Aristotle, the issue here is to show that artifacts
are what they are and how they are precisely in the movedness
of production and thus in the rest of having-been-produced” (192)
The term, entelecheia, “coined by Aristotle himself, is the fundamental word of his thinking, and it embodies that knowledge of being that brings Greek philosophy to its fulfillment. ‘Entelecheia’ comprises the basic concept of Western metaphysics…” (216).
“We forget what is decisive, namely, that the Greeks conceive of movedness in terms of rest….Movedness means the essence from which both movement and rest are determined. Rest is then the ‘cessation’ of movement. The lack of movement can be calculated as its limit-case (=0). But in fact even rest, which we thus take to /// be a derivative of movement, also has movedness as its essence. The purest manifestation of the essence of movedness is to be found where rest does not mean the breaking off and cessation of movement, but rather where movedness is gathered up into standing still, and where this ingathering, far from excluding movedness, includes and for the first time discloses it” (216-217).
“Thus the movedness of a movement consists above all in the fact that the movement of a moving being gathers itself into its end, telos, and as so gathered within its end, ‘has’ itself: en telei echei, entelecheia, having-itself-in-its-end. Instead of the word entelecheia, which he himself coined, Aristotle also uses the word energeia. Here in place of telos, there stands ergon, the ‘work’ in the sense of what is to be produced and what has been pro-duced. In Greek thought energeia means ‘standing in the work,’ where ‘work’ means that which stands fully in its ‘end.’ But in turn the ‘fully ended or fulfilled’ does not mean ‘the concluded,’ any more than telos means ‘conclusion.’ Rather, in Greek thought telos and ergon are defined by eidos; they name the manner and mode in which something stands ‘finally and finitely’ in its appearance” (217).
“Take the case of generation: a table coming into existence.
Here we obviously find movements. But Aristotle does not mean the ‘movements’
performed by the carpenter in handling the tools and the word. Rather, in the
generation of the table, Aristotle is thinking precisely of the movement of what is being generated itself and as such.
Kinesis is metabole, the change of something into
something, such that in the change the very act of change itself breaks out
into the open, i.e., comes into appearance along with the changing thing….What
sort of being does this change have? (217)
and physis
AP
“Here Aristotle explicitly emphasizes what he perceives to be decisive for the project of the essence of physis, namely, kinesis, the state of movedness. And therefore the key issue in the question about ‘physics’ becomes one of defining the essence of movement” (186).
“But it was Aristotle who first attained—and thus, first created—that level of questioning where (movement is not considered as something merely given along with other things, but rather where) being-moved is explicitly questioned and understood as the fundamental mode of being” (187).
AP
“From this we infer what ‘being’ meant for the Greeks. They address beings as the ‘stable’….We would certainly not be thinking like the Greeks if we were to conceive of the stable as what ‘stands over against’ in the sense of the objective. Something ‘standing over against’ [Gegenstand] is the /// ‘translation’ of the word ‘object.’ But beings can be experienced as objects only where human beings have become subjects, those who experience their fundamental relation to beings as the objectification—understood as mastery—of what is encountered. For the Greeks, human beings are never subjects, and therefore non-human beings can never have the character of objects….Physis is what is responsible for the fact that the stable has a unique kind of standing-on-its-own” (188-189)
“Arche means, at one and the same time, beginning and control. On a broader and therefore lower scale we can say: origin and ordering….Physis is arche, i.e., the origin and ordering of movedness and rest, specifically in a moving being that has this arche in itself….Plants and animals are in movedness even when they stand still and rest. Rest is a kind of movement; only that which is able to move can rest….Because plants and animals are in movement regardless of whether they rest or move, for this reason not only are they in movement; they are in movedness. This means: they are not, in the first instance, beings…that occasionally happen to slip into states of movement. Rather they are beings only insofar as they have their essential /// abode and ontological footing in movedness” (189-190).
Like the plant which “goes back into” its roots to take its stand, “The act of self-unfolding emergence is inherently a going-back-into-itself. This kind of becoming present is physis. But it must not be thought of as a kind of built-in ‘motor’ that drives something, nor as an ‘organizer’ on hand somewhere, directing the thing. Nonetheless, we might be tempted to fall back on the notion that physei-determined beings could be a kind that make themselves” (195).
The decisive principle that guides Aristotle’s
interpretation of physis declares that physis must be understood as ousia, as a kind and mode of presencing” (200).
and gathering
AM
“Legein means ‘to glean’ [lesen], that is
to harvest, to gather, to /// add one to the other, to include and connect one
with the other. Such laying together is a laying open [Dar-legen] and laying forth [Vorlegen]:…a making something accessible in a gathered
and unified way. And since such a gathering laying open and laying forth
occurs above all in recounting and speaking (in trans-mitting
and com-municating to others), logos comes to mean
discourse that combines and explains” (2-3).
“The gathering and explaining of discourse makes things accessible and manifest” (3).
“Logos: the relation, the relationship…is what holds together that which stands within it. The unity of this together prevails over and rules the relation of what holds itself in that relation. Logos means therefore rule, law, yet not as something which is suspended somewhere above what is ruled, but rather as that which is itself the relationship: the inner jointure and order of the being which stand in relation. Logos is the ruling structure, the gathering of those beings related among themselves” (103)
“Logos is thus discourse in the utterly broad sense of the manifold making known and giving notice [Kundgeben]—‘conversance’ [Kundschaft]…. /// Meta logou, in contrast, is something which has conversance there along with it in what and how it is. Conversance: the possibility of taking and giving notice and thus the possibility of exploring and becoming conversant and so being conversant” (104-105).
“The current translations of logos as ‘reason,’ ‘judgment,’ and /// ‘sense’ do not capture the decisive meaning: gathering joining and making known. They overlook what is originally and properly ancient and thus at once essential to the word and concept” (104-105).
“Logos does not mean reason. The Aristotelian problem makes sense only if logos has a certain kinship to aesthesis. This kinship lies in the fact that both—the exploring and being-conversant as well as the perceiving—in some way uncover and unconceal that toward which they are directed….The extent to which Aristotle also intends in a certain sense to ascribe to animals logos—conversance in the sense of a circumspection which knows its way around, can be seen in Met. A 1, where Aristotle attributes to some animals…a certain phronesis (something like circumspection)…Here it should be noted that besides ethical and practical behavior, phronesis also signifies the self-sensing of human beings” (108-109).
Both knowledge of things and circumspective calculation “belong to logos as conversance, on the basis of which human beings are aware of things and investigate them. At the same time, they are aware of their own possibilities and necessities. Whenever this conversance addresses itself to things and discusses them, it is a conversance which deliberates with both itself and others; a conversance which debates with itself and calls itself into account. It is an ‘I’ saying” (109).
and telos and eidos
S
“The ‘what’ of these objects that is addressed (logos
[discourse]) and their look (eidos) are in a sense the same. And this means
that what is addressed in logos makes up as such these beings in the authentic
sense” (128).
AM
“The formation of a model can occur only as a bringing into bounds of what belongs to the model. It is a selecting, a selective gathering of what belongs together, a legein. Eidos is a kind of being gathered together and selected, a legomenon; it is logos. Eidos is also telos—the ending end, teleion—the perfected, the fulfilled, the gleaned, the selected; telos is in accord with its essence, always selection: logos.
“But eidos is logos even in the meaning of logos which we at the same time misunderstand, when logos signifies discourse, language, saying. Eidos is what it is only insofar as along with it and through something which is to be produced is addressed as what is to be present later. Selection is addressing as…, legein. The ‘addressing as’ or, more exactly, this ‘as’ itself has the character of ‘as this or that.’ The as is always in some way or other a selecting with a view toward something.
“The eidos says what is to be produced. It is the such and such which is addressed as this or that. It intrinsically excludes others. The eidos assumes leadership in the whole process of production. It is the authority and regulator which says what the standard is. It does so from out of itself—kath auto (1046b13), but always in a way that excludes others. This other is, however, what is constantly present along with it. It is what occurs with it…inasmuch as the material and each particular state in the course of production offer occasions for mistakes and failure and for being irregular. Thus logos, the selected and above all the addressed, is /// constantly what excludes, but this means that it is what includes the contrary with it. What this says is that the contrary is ‘there’ and manifest in a peculiar way in the very fact of avoiding it and getting out of its way” (121-122).
AM
“In the eidos of the ergon, its being-at-an-end—the end which it encloses—is in advance already anticipated. /// The eidos of the ergon is telos. The end which finishes, however, is in its essence, boundary, peras. To produce something is in itself to forge something into its boundaries…” (117-118).
IM
“But this erect standing-there, coming up and enduring is what the Greeks understood by being. Yet what thus comes up and becomes intrinsically stable…encounters, freely and spontaneously, the necessity of its limit, peras. This limit is not something that comes to the being from outside. Still less is it a deficiency in the sense of a harmful restriction. No, the hold that governs itself from out of the limit, the having-itself, wherein the enduring holds itself, is the being of the being; it is what first makes the being into a being as differentiated from a nonbeing. Coming to stand accordingly means: to achieve a limit for itself, to limit itself (49)
AP
“And telos does not mean ‘goal’ or ‘purpose,’ but ‘end’ in the sense of the finite perfectedness that determines the essence of something; only for this reason can it be taken /// as a goal and posited as a purpose” (192-193).
“But peras in Greek philosophy is not ‘limit’ in the sense of the outer boundary, the point where something ends. The limit is always what limits, defines, gives footing and stability, that by which and in which something begins and is. Whatever becomes present and absent without limit has of and by itself no presencing, and it devolves into instability” (206).
AM
“For material as such, for example, as iron, as metal, is precisely not yet what is to be made out of it. Seen from eidos and telos it is, on the contrary, apeiron, that which is without boundaries, the unbounded, that which has not yet been brought into bounds but, at the same time, is to be bounded. Precisely because the definitely demarcated material is tailored on the basis of the ergon, precisely for this reason, it likewise stands as unbounded over and against the eidos. Both are directed away from one another and yet toward one another; thus there is an opposition, and that is to say, a facing one another which is necessarily mutual—a neighborhood, and indeed one /// whose extension is the farthest. This is the concept of the Greek enantion: a lying opposite each other and confronting each other face to face: enantiotes (contrariness), which Aristotle actually first fully clarified in its essence…Eidos, as telos and peras, necessarily furnishes itself with such an opposite as apeiron; in the bounded apeiron (of hyle), eidos becomes its morphê” (118-119).
AP
“In general, morphê means: placing into the appearance….By translating morphê as placing into the appearance, we mean to express initially two things that are of equal importance to the sense of the Greek term but that are thoroughly lacking on our word ‘form.’ First, placing into the appearance is a mode of presencing, ousia. Morphe is not an ontic property present in matter, but a way of being. Second, ‘placing into the appearance’ is movedness, kinesis, which ‘moment’ is radically lacking in the concept of form” (211).
“What does ‘matter’ mean? Does it mean just ‘raw material’? No, Aristotle characterizes hyle as to dynamei. Dynamis means the capacity, or better, the appropriateness for…The wood present in the workshop is in a state of appropriateness for a ‘table’” (214).
“Steresis as absencing is not
simply absentness; rather, it /// is a presencing,
namely, that kind in which the absencing
(but not the absent thing) is present” (226-227).
“The self-placing into appearance always lets something be present in such a way that in the presencing an absencing simultaneously becomes present. While the blossom ‘buds forth’ (phuei), the leaves that prepared for the blossom now fall off. The fruit comes to light, while the blossom disappears. The self-placing into appearance, the morphê, has a steresis-character, and this now means: morphê is dichos, intrinsically twofold, the presencing of an absencing” (227).
and being
PS
Plato uses the term ousia in its
ordinary sense although “within certain limits, ousia
is already a significant term for Plato” (186). He employs it in the definition
of technê, which “betrays a fundamental connection between the meaning of ousia and that of poiêsis” (187). This is related to the
“natural ontology” which unreflective man brings to bear on experience and in
which “pragmata” of daily action appear as the archetype of being in general
(187).
technê as art
S
“This mode of the true safekeeping of being is {technê [art]}” (129).
BQP
“Technê does not mean ‘technology’ in the sense of the mechanical ordering of beings, nor does it mean art in the sense of mere skill and proficiency in procedures and operations. Technê means knowledge: know-how in processes against beings (and in the encounter with beings), i.e., against physis” (154).
as knowledge
EHF
For the Greeks, “the word technê stood for knowledge as a whole, i.e. simply for the making manifest of beings. Technê neither means technique as practical activity nor is limited to craft knowledge, but it signifies all producing in the broadest sense, together with its guiding knowledge. It expresses the struggle around the presence of beings” (50).
IM
“Knowledge in the authentic sense of technê is the initial and persistent looking out beyond what is given at any time. In different ways, by different channels, and in different realms, this transcendence (Hinaussein) effects (setzt ins Werk) what /// first gives the datum its relative justification, its potential determinateness, and hence its limit….The Greeks called art in the true sense and the work of art technê, because art is what most immediately brings being (i.e. the appearing that stands there in itself) to stand, stabilizes it in something present” (the work) (134-135)
“The human essence shows itself here to be the relation which first opens up being to man. Being-human, as the need of apprehension and collection, is a being-driven into the freedom of undertaking technê, the sapient embodiment of being” (142).
AP
“The arche of artifacts is technê. Technê does not mean ‘technique’ in the sense of methods and acts of production, nor does it mean ‘art’ in the wider sense of an ability to produce something. Rather, technê is a form of knowledge; it means: know-how in, i.e. familiarity with, what grounds every act of making and producing. It means knowing what the production of, e.g., a bedstead, must come to, where it must achieves its end and be completed. In Greek, this ‘end’ is called telos….But again, the essence of technê is not movement in the sense of the activity of manipulating things; rather, it is know-how in dealing with things” (192).
episteme poietike as technê
AM
“…episteme poietike, on the other hand, is technê (see Nic. Eth. Z 3-4). But technê can also have the meaning of a pure being familiar with things. We can gather from all this that the Greek concept of knowledge in general is essentially determined in this way, that is, in terms of the human being's basic relation to the work, to that which is fulfilled and fully at an end. Of course, this has nothing to do with a primitive understanding of the world which operates within a horizon of handmade artworks instead of our supposedly higher mathematico-physical horizon” (111).
dynamis meta logou
as technê
AM
“We ourselves as human beings are the beings who are meta logou in the authentic sense, that is, the beings who exist” (110).
“…dynamis meta logou (technê)…” (177).
and physis
BQP
“Now it is clear that this perceiving of beings in their unconcealedness is not a mere gaping, that wonder is carried out rather in a procedure against beings, but in such a way that these themselves precisely show themselves. For that is what technê means: to grasp beings as emerging out of themselves in the way they show themselves, in their outward look, eidos, idea, and, in accord with this, to care for beings themselves and to let them grow, i.e., to order oneself within beings as a whole through productions and institutions. Technê is a mode of proceeding against physis, though not yet in order to overpower it or exploit it, and above all not in order to turn use and calculation into principles, but, on the contrary, to retain the holding sway of physis in unconcealedness” (155).
“”Technê and its carrying out become necessary as what is
wholly other than physis—wholly other yet belonging to physis in the most
essential way” (155).
AP
In medicine, “Technê can merely cooperate with physis, can more or less expedite the cure; but as technê it can never replace physis and in its stead become the arche of health as such. This could happen only if life as such were to become a ‘technically’ producible artifact. However, at that very moment there would also no longer be such a thing as health, any more than there would be birth and death” (197).
The plant sinks roots and so has its arche in itself. It goes back into that on which it stands. An artifact such as a house has its arche outside itself, in the builder, and so cannot go back into itself to find its own origin. The point is not just the exteriority of the arche in the case of technê but the fact that the arche in the case of physis brings out the truth of the object in setting it into appearance. “Therefore, in determining the essence of the physei onta, it is not enough merely to say they have the arche of their movedness in themselves. Rather, we are required to add this special determination: in themselves, specifically inasmuch as they are themselves and are in and with themselves.…Technê renounces any claim to knowing and grounding truth as such” (198).
“The renewed attempt to clarify the essence of physis by way of an analogy with technê fails precisely here “from every conceivable point of view” (223).
and technology
BQP
“What is the basic attitude in which the preservation of the
wondrous, the beingness of beings, unfolds and, at the same time, defines
itself? We have to seek it in what the Greeks call technê. Yet we must divorce
this Greek word from our familiar term derived from it, ‘technology,’ and from
all nexuses of meaning that are thought in the name of technology. To be sure,
that modern and contemporary technology could emerge, and had to emerge, has
its ground in the beginning and has its foundation in an unavoidable incapacity
to hold fast to the beginning. That means that contemporary technology—as a
form of ‘total mobilization’ (Ernst Jünger)—can only be understood on the basis
of the beginning of the basic Western position toward beings as such and as a
whole…” (154).
“For in the essence of technê, as required by physis itself,
as the occurrence and establishment of the unconcealedness of beings, there
lies the possibility of arbitrariness,
of an unbridled positing of goals and thereby the possibility of escape out of
the necessity of the primordial need” (155).
defined
AM
Dynamis kata kinesis is “being the origin of change, an origin which as such is in a being other than the one which is itself changing, or, if the originary being and the changing are the same, then they are so each in a different respect….As source, as arche, it is en allow—in another” (57).
“Arche metaboles means then: being an origin for a transposing pro-ducing, a bring something forth, bringing something about. This means being an origin for having been produced, having been brought about” (75).
“If we were once again briefly to list all the essential elements, they would be: to force there belongs the from-out-of-which of a being-out-toward, and the reciprocal relation to what bears in the broadest sense. Each of the two exhibits the character of an implicating delineation which carries along with it as preeminently possessive the possibility of loss and withdrawal. The outwardly directed implication persists in this way in some kind of definite or non-differentiated how” (97).
AP
“Certainly dynamis also means ‘ability’ and it can be used as the word for ‘power,’ but when Aristotle employs dynamis as the opposite concept to entelecheia /// and energeia, he uses the word…as a thoughtful name for an essential basic concept in which beingness, ousia, is thought. We already translated dynamis as appropriateness and being appropriate for…” (218-219).
as art, AM, 60
AM
“…here we are taking dynamis as art or as ability” (60).
neither obj. nor subj.
AM
“In the end, is what we are here calling force, capacity, etc., something which in its essence is neither subjective nor objective? But if neither the one nor the other, where then do these phenomena belong? Do they at all allow themselves to be determined out of an origin? (64)
tolerating, bearance and resistance
AM
Aristotle distinguishes bearance and resistance as two types of dynamis, dynamis tou pathein and dynamis tou apatheias. “With the transformation of the clay into the bowl, the lump also loses its form, but fundamentally it loses its formlessness; it gives up a lack, and hence the tolerating here is at once a positive contribution to the development of something higher” (74).
Bearance as tolerating a change and resistance as “the self-asserting, enduring, and coming through against damage and degradation” (75) belong to the “guiding meaning” of dynamis as “arche metaboles—the from-out-of-which for change” (75). Dynamis tou pathein concerns “that from out of which change is allowed, or else that from out of which such change is resisted. Here also is a relationship to change” (75). “For that which is the orign for a resisting, what resists, is in itself indissociably—not incidentally—referred to something which runs up against it, to such a thing which does something to it, which wants and ought to do something to it (poiein). In the same way: the fragile, that which does not hold up, decays, and is thereby ‘exposed’—to another which works on it. The dynamis tou pathein has a reference to a dynamis tou poiein that inheres in its very constitution, a reference to doing” (75).
“We experience the forceful not first in the subject but in the resisting object. And in its resistance, we experience in turn its non-ability, its restriction. And only in this do we experience a wanting to be able, a tending to be able, and an ought to be able” (77).
“The essence of force as force for producing also encompasses in a certain way this being ‘out of something’ of producibility. The ‘out of something; of a thing’s producibility is, however, dynamis tou paschein. This dynamis (as arche, as that from out of which something becomes producible) is implicated in the essence of the dynamis tou poiein. This is the case not only in general, but rather every particular producing, for example that of an axe, is related to stone, bronze, iron, and the like, but not to water, sand, or wood….The result of all this is that force in itself is the relation of the arche tou poiein to an arche tou paschein, and vice versa. The essence of force in itself, in terms of its own essence and in relation to this essence, diverges into two forces in an originary way. This of course does not mean that a definite individual force directly at hand consists of two forces, but rather that this force in its essence, that is, being a force as such, is this relation of the poiein to a paschein: being a force is both as once…” (89).
“For what does it mean that dynamis is the from-out-of-which, which implicates into its own realm that which in itself is able to bear? This indeed says only that force, on the basis of its essence, first provides a possible site for a change from something to something. To say that what can endure is exposed to something which works it over means: something like change is already and necessarily signified in this reciprocal relation, both what permits being formed into shape as well as the forming production. Hence metabole in the fully understood guiding meaning no longer means one-sidedly only the active transforming; neither is /// it passive bearing simply appended on to this. Instead it means the reciprocal relation of both as such” (97-98).
as how to
AM
“We simply say of a good speaker: He is a speaker. Being means here having in the right way the power to do the task at hand. Having the /// power for something is properly a force first when it is in the right way….To having the power for something, there belongs necessarily a how which can modify itself in such and such a way but which carries within itself the claim to a possible fulfillment” (84-85).
“Precisely in the concept of dynamis kata kinesis there is then also a reference to telos which inheres in its very constitution. This does not mean anything like ‘purposeful behavior,’ but rather: an inner ordering of something toward an end, a conclusion, an accomplishment. Hence dynamis implies the moment of being on the way toward something, of the oriented striving, oriented toward an end and a being accomplished—and hence there belongs to the inner structure of dynamis the character of ‘in such and such a way,’ ‘this way or that,’ in short: the how” (85).
“Hence, the power for something is always a not falling short of a definite how. In the essence of force there is, as it were, the demand upon itself to surpass itself” (85).
as readiness
AM
“Now it becomes clearer how the actuality of dynasthai is to be comprehended through echein, having and holding, namely as holding oneself in readiness, holding the capability itself in readiness. This being held is its actual presence” (188).
and logos
AM
Forces that are meta logou differ from forces that are alogos in that the former refer directly to contraries while the latter do not. Thus the healing art aims at health by addressing sickness as its problem task. A fire merely heats a cold stone without addressing coldness as such.
“And so, because the openness of the realm of force happens for this force in and through the logos which belongs to it, the open realm is not only completely wider, but within this realm the contrary is necessarily posited, in the relational realm of force” (114)
“Conversance is not only the abode of manifestness; it is also at the same time the site of the manifestness of the contraries….When we examine the content of our passage, we discover first of all the connection of dynamis kata kinesis and logos; then the connection of both of these with steresis; and finally, the connection of these with the negative and the opposite, with opposition and the not” (115).
and entelecheia
AP
“The thing that changes is the wood lying present here, not just any wood but this wood that is appropriate. /// But ‘appropriate for’ means: tailored to the appearance of a table, hence of that wherein the generating of the table—the movement—comes to its end. The change of the appropriate word into a table consists in the fact that the very appropriateness of what is appropriated emerges more fully into view and reaches its fulfillment in the appearance of a table and thus comes to stand in the table that has been pro-duced, placed forth, i.e. into the unhidden. In the rest that goes with this standing (of what has attained its stand), the emerging appropriateness (dynamis) of the appropriate (dynamei) gathers itself up and ‘has’ itself (echei) as in its end (telos). Therefore Aristotle says…: The having-itself-in-its-end of what is appropriate as something appropriate (i.e., in its appropriateness) is clearly (the essence of) movedness” (217-218).
“But therefore having-itself-within-its-end (entelecheia) is the essence of movedness (that is, it is the being of a moving being), because this repose most perfectly fulfills what ousia is: the intrinsically stable presencing in the appearance. Aristotle says this in his own way…: “Manifestly standing-in-the-work is prior to appropriateness for…” In this sentence Aristotle’s thinking and pari passu Greek thinking, reaches its peak” (218).
“Energeia fulfills the essence of intrinsically stable presencing more essentially than dynamis does” (219).
and unforce
Unforce is the specific withdrawal or failure of a force in the sense in which blindness is the specific loss of the force of sight.
S
“The fundamental category of steresis pervading Aristotle’s ontology…” (142)
AM
“Here it is stated: In addition to force there is unforce, ‘im-potentia,’ non-force. Yet this non-and this un- are not merely negations, but mean rather having withdrawn, ‘being in a state of withdrawal’—steresis” (92).
“What is emphasized here is the referring back of unforce
upon the same thing by which force is force” (93).
“The decisive thesis reads (a30-31): ‘Every force is unforce with reference to and in accordance with the same thing.’ This states that unforce is nevertheless bound to the realm of force that remains withdrawn from it” (94).
“We, too, still use today the expression ‘impotent’ (powerless) in a distinctive and emphatic sense with reference to the power of procreation. This points to a special bond between ‘force’ and ‘life’ (as a definite mode of einai, of being), a bond with which we are acquainted from daily experience and common knowledge…” (95).
“Dynamis is in a preeminent sense exposed and bound to steresis” (95).
“(1) Every dynamis is prepared at all times for the occasion
of lapse and failure; the possibility of sinking into unforce is inherent in
it; this does not merely relate to it circumstantially, as though unforce were
something other. (2) The conditioned relationship of poiein
and eu poiein is such the
former follows the latter (not the reverse)” (140).
its centrality
S
“What did being in any sense whatsoever really mean for Aristotle? How is 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” (127).
AM
“Not only did the Greeks, Plato and Aristotle, carry out the interpretation of this phenomenon of production, but the basic concepts of philosophy have grown out of and within this interpretation” ((117)
and man
AM
“We have to clarify for ourselves what it signifies that man has a relation to the works that he produces. It is for this reason that a certain book called Sein und Zeit discusses dealings with equipment; and not in order to correct Marx, nor to organize a new national economy, nor out of a primitive understanding of the world” (117).
We must “constantly [keep] in view the essential constitution of producing a work—not only as a fundamental component of man but as a decisive determination of the existential being of the Dasein of antiquity” (120).
and logos
AM
“Producing is intrinsically a talking to oneself and letting oneself talk. To tell oneself something does not just mean to form words but to want to proceed in a certain way, that is, to have already gone there in advance” (124).
“Producing is therefore in no way simply accompanied by a succession of assertions which are superimposed on it; nor is episteme poietike only a series of propositions and assertions. Rather, it is a fundamental posture toward the world, that is, toward the enclosed openness of beings. Where there is world, there is work and vice versa” (125).
and being
S
“Thus the toward-which this primordial experience [for Aristotle] 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 (poiêsis), i.e., what has come into a being-on-hand and is now available for certain tendencies to use it. /// 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” (127-128)
“In circumspection, life is there for itself in the concrete how of the with-which of going about its dealings. However, and this is decisive, in Aristotle it is not on the basis of this phenomenon and not in a positive manner that the being of the with-which of dealings is ontologically defined. Rather, it is defined simply in a formal manner as capable of being otherwise than it is and thus not necessarily and always what it is. This ontological definition gets actualized through a negative comparison with another kind of being that is considered to be being in the authentic sense. In accord with its basic characteristics, this kind of being is for its part not arrived at through an explication of the being of human life as such. Rather in its categorical structure, it springs from an ontological radicalization of the idea of beings that are moved, and this is carried out and actualized in a particular manner. It is the motion of production that is taken in to forehaving as exemplary for these kinds of beings and for the possibility of bringing into relief their structural sense. Being is being-finished-and-ready, i.e., a kind of being in which motion has arrived at its end” (136).
“For the primary sense of being is being-produced [Hergestelltsein]” (144). Heidegger concludes that the “accidental” is abstracted from the essential being of the thing along the lines of what is produced and the environing world. Thus the distinction of essence and accident parallels the distinction of production and “the modes of the look and the encountering of the objects of dealings in which these objects are given in terms of their full significance in the environing world (e.g., the being-comfortable of the house, its being-pleasant, being-conveniently-located, and being-well lit)…must appear as a mere being-found-along-with…something closely akin to non-being...” (145)
AM
“For even that which is not in need of production, and precisely this, is also understood with respect to its being in terms of the essence of having been produced. This is the sense of the basic fact that such concepts as eidos, telos, and peras, as fundamental moments of beings, are not restricted to things which have been produced, but rather concern the full array of beings” (154).
“Now if we say presence is having been produced, then everything which has been thus far adduced must be thought along with this in order to allow for the full significance of the fundamental Greek concept of being, ousia, as parousia, presence (and as the counter concept to apousia, absence)” (154).
AP
“Ergon, work, means neither making nor the artifact made, but that which is to be pro-duced, brought into presencing” (222).
and physis
AP
“But what if we should find our way back to the realm of being as understood by the Greeks? Then we see that making, poiêsis, is one kind of production, whereas ‘growing’ (the going back into itself and emerging out of itself), physis, is another. Here ‘to pro-duce’ cannot mean ‘to make’ but rather: to place something into the unhiddenness of its appearance; to let something become present; presencing….In those cases where the appearance merely shows up, and in showing up only guides a know-how in the producing of it and plays an accompanying role rather than actually performing the production—there production is a making.
“This way of showing up is certainly one kind of presencing, but it is not the only kind. It is also possible that an appearance—without showing up specifically as a paradeigma, namely, in and for a technê—can directly present itself as what takes over the placing into itself. The appearance places itself forth….And in thus placing itself forth it places itself into itself; i.e., it itself produces something with its kind of appearance. This is morphê as physis” (221).
and contraries
AM
“Production, in the way of proceeding that is appropriate to it, is in itself a doing and leaving undone—a doing something and leaving its contrary alone. Particularly because producing is in itself a doing and leaving alone, therefore, that to which it is related is enantia” (117).
“To produce something is in itself to forge something into its boundaries, so much so that this being-enclosed is already in view in advance along with all that it includes and excludes…” (118).
AM
“Being an arche, being an original for…, does not mean, then, a thing or a property from which something proceeds. Instead, being an origin for something other is in itself a proceeding to the other (85).
AP
“The word and concept of ‘cause’ makes us think almost automatically of ‘causality’ [Kausalitat], that is, the manner and mode in which one thing ‘acts on’ another. Aition, for which Aristotle will soon introduce a more precise definition, means in the present context: that which is responsible for the fact that a being is what it is” (188).
as finished
EHF
“The Greeks, and above all Aristotle, see the workhood of work not in terms of its origin, nor in terms of the person who sets the work into motion, but in the moment of being finished and ready….The workhood of work consists in its being finished.. And what does this mean? Being ready and finished is the same as producedness. And again, not necessarily in the sense of being produced rather than growing up by and of itself. Rather, the understanding is directed towards the inner content of producedness, to being brought to stand forth from here to there, and, as such, to be now standing there. So producedness means there-standingness [Da-stehendneit], and energeia means a self-holding in producedness and there-standingness” (48).
“It is not a matter of the embodiment of form in substance, nor of the process of production of beings, but of that which resides in the producedness of the produced thing. The question concerns the way in which workhood must be conceived if it is to announce the being of beings. The answer is that precisely the look [Aussehen] of the thing comes to expression in its producedness. Ousia, the being-present of a being as actually present, consists in the parousia of the eidos, i.e. in the presence of its look. Actuality means producedness, there-standingness as the presence of its look” (49).
“We are in the habit of saying that for something to be actual, it must first be possible. Thus possibility is primary and prior, before actuality. But Aristotle maintains the contrary position: proteron energeia dynameos estin. Actuality is prior and primary with respect to possibility” (75).
and how to
AM
Although the essence need not be realized in actuality to be, essence and actuality are linked as dynamis to energeia by the “how to.”
“The full essence of a being, however, pertains both to the
what of a being and to the how of its potential or actual actuality” (192).
as look
BQP
The practical relation to things requires that we “sight in advance” the “whatness” or essence of things, without which we could not encounter them. However, this sighting must remain implicit in practical affairs. “Nevertheless, again, what the thing is, the constantly present, must be sighted in advance and indeed necessarily so. ‘To see’ is in Greek idein; what is in sight, precisely as sighted, is idea. What is sighted is what the being is in advance and constantly. The ‘what it is,’ the whatness, is the idea; and conversely, the ‘idea’ is the whatness, and the latter is the essence. More precisely, and more in the Greek vein, the idea is the look something offers, the aspect it has and, as it were, shows of itself, the eidos. Only in the light of what is seen in advance and constantly, yet not explicitly observed, e.g., house, can we experience and use this door as a door, this staircase as a staircase to this storey with these rooms” (56).
“Everything that we see in particulars is always determined by what we have in view in advance….[It becomes] the hypokeimenon for the…seeing. What is essential is not what we presumably establish with exactness by means of instruments and gadgets; what is essential is the view in advance which first opens up the field for anything to be established” (60).
“The reason the Greeks understand essence as whatness is that they in general understand the Being of beings (ousia) as what is constant and in its constancy is always present, and as present shows itself, and as self-showing offers its look—in short, as look, as idea (61).
priority over existence
BQP
“Thought and seen in the Greek-Platonic way, the single table here and now is certainly not nothing and hence is a being (on), but one which, measured against the essence, is a constriction and therefore properly should not be (un), a un on. For the Greeks, in the individual things surrounding us and in their relations, what properly is is precisely not the ‘here and now, such /// and such,’ the particular ‘this’ but is, quite to the contrary, the ‘what’ of the individual thing, that which is sighted in advance, the idea. Even Aristotle thinks in this Platonic-Greek mode—despite certain modifications.
“Today, however, if a table is real as here and now, then we say it is, it ‘exists,’ whereas the ‘idea’ is for us something only represented and imagined, a mere thought, and precisely not properly real. Therefore for us today ‘ideas’ are worthless if they are not realized. We are interested in realization and success, to such an extent that in the pursuit of success the ‘ideas’ finally get lost” (62-63).
“The realization of the essence is in a certain sense accidental to the essence, and at the same time is an impairment of the pure essence, for in a real table only one possibility is realized” (67).
“We are acquainted with the ‘essence’ of the things surrounding us: house, tree, bird, road, vehicle, man, etc., and yet we have no knowledge of the essence. For we immediately land in the uncertain, shifting, controversial, and groundless, when we attempt to determine more closely, and above all try to ground in its determinateness, what is certainly though still indeterminately ‘known’: namely, house-ness, tree-ness, bird-ness, humanness. On the other hand, we are able to distinguish these things very well…This acquaintance with the essence—no matter how preliminary and undetermined…--guides us constantly and everywhere at every step….This remarkable state of affairs indicates that it is not the immediately given facts—the individual real, graspable, and visible things, precisely those that are intended and acquired—that possess the decisive ‘closeness’ to ‘life.’ More close to life, to use this way of speaking, closer than so-called ‘reality,’ is the essence of things, which we know and yet do not know” (73).
“The ‘bringing forth’ of the essence, according to our preceding reflections, means first of all and polemically that the essence is not gleaned from the individual cases as their universal; it has its own origin. When we today speak of bringing forth, we think of the making and fabricating of an individual object. But this is precisely what is not intended; bringing forth—we use this expression intentionally—must be taken here quote literally. The essence is brought forth, brought out from its previous obscurity and hiddenness….This seeing…is a seeing which draws forth, a seeing which in the very act of seeing compels what is to be seen before itself. Therefore we call this seeing, which first brings forth into visibility that which is to be seen, and produces it before itself, ‘productive seeing’ [Er-sehen] (76).
“For the Greeks, the essence and the positing of the essence thus stand within a peculiar twilight: the essence is not manufactured, but it is also not simply encountered like a thing already present at hand. Instead, it is brought forth in a productive seeing” (77).
“In productive seeing, a conformity to something pregiven is not possible, because the productive seeing itself first brings about the pregivenness” (77).
“Now if even the representation of the essence (idea) cannot but appear arbitrary and groundless, yet on the other hand is constantly carried out without any strangeness, then this two-foldness will apply all the more to our entrance in to the essentialization. Access to the essence always has about it something of the immediate and partakes of the creative, the freely arisen. We therefore speak of a leap, a leap ahead into the essentialization of truth” (173).
AP
Epagoge means ‘leading toward’ what comes into view insofar as we have previously looked away, over and beyond individual beings. At what? At being. For example, only if we already have treeness in view can we identify individual trees. Epagoge is seeing and making visible what already stands in view—for example, treeness. Epagoge is ‘constituting’ in the double sense of, first, bringing something up into view and then likewise establishing what has been seen. Epagoge is what immediately becomes suspect to those caught up in scientific thinking and mostly remains foreign to them. These people see in it an inadmissible petitio principii, i.e., an ‘offense’ against ‘empirical thinking,’ whereas…it is the ‘offensive’ that breaks open the territory within whose borders a science can first settle down” (187).
“As against this, Aristotle demands that we see that the
individual beings in any given instance (this house here and that mountain
there) are not at all non-beings, but indeed beings insofar as they put
themselves forth into the appearance of house and mountain and so first place
this appearance into presencing. In other words, eidos is genuinely understood
as eidos only when it appears with the horizon of one’s immediate addressing of
a being, eidos to kata to logon” (210).
AM
The difficulty is to imagine how objective being can become present without its dependence on a “besouled” being diminishing its “self-reliance,” “but rather precisely makes it possible for such being to secure this self-reliance in the truth….The independence of things at hand from humans is not altered through the fact that this very independence as such is possible only if humans exist” (173).
BQP
“The first task was then to apprehend beings as beings, to
install the pure recognition of beings as such, and nothing more. This was
quite enough if we consider what was simultaneously grounded with it: the
primordial determination of man as that being which, in the midst of beings as
a whole, lets beings hold sway in their unconcealedness. This letting hold sway
is accomplished by exhibiting beings in their forms and modes of presence and
by preserving beings therein—occurrences in which poetry as well as painting
and sculpture, the act that founds a state, and the worshipping of the gods
first obtain their essence…” (128).
QB
“Presencing (‘being’) is, as presencing, on each and every occasion a presencing directed toward the human essence, insofar as presencing is a call that on each occasion calls upon the human essence” (308).
EHF
“Being-true is the being-true of the pragmaton, the things, thus is not a property of conceptual thought of things, is not truth as pertaining to knowledge of beings, is not a property of propositions, of the logos about beings, does not concern opinion of…as such; none of that, but being-true pertains simply to the beings themselves” (62).
BQP
“The Greeks experienced the essence of truth as unconcealedness….[But] their thinking did not penetrate further into alêtheia as such, and they did not fathom it explicitly in its essence. Instead, they merely stood under the force of the emerging but still furled essence of truth as unconcealedness” (98).
“In order to bring into view what resides in a visual field, the visual field itself must precisely light up first, so that it might illuminate what /// resides within it; however, it cannot and may not be seen explicitly. The field of view, alêtheia, must in a certain sense be overlooked” (128).
“Aletheia if for the Greeks
a—indeed, the—basic determination of
beings themselves” (113).