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Aristotle’s Hermeneutics of Facticity: Heidegger’s Early Phenomenological Interpretation of Aristotle Martin Heidegger. Grundbegriffe der Aristotelischen Philosophie. Vol. 18 of Gesamtausgabe, II. Abteilung: Vorlesungen 1919–1944. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 2002. 418 pp. Translated by Robert Metcalf and Mark Basil Tanzer as Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming.
As such, SS 1924 provides us with perhaps our best glimpse into how that book in Aristotle might have looked. All signs indicate that it would have been a remarkable book. From all indications, it would have been even more difficult that Being and Time, in view of the staggering depth, detail, and density of this Greek-German dialogue with the original texts of Aristotelian opus, in a frenetic intensity that must have overwhelmed the students of the course. Ted Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time
A. Introduction: The Context of Heidegger’s 1924 Aristotle Lecture Course Heidegger’s 1924 summer semester (SS) lecture course Grundbegriffe der Aristotelischen Philosophie (GA 18) represents the culmination of his attempt to work out a phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle. This pro- ject had been the main focus of Heidegger’s thinking at least as early as 1921, and while he had not made his work public for several years, by the fall of 1922, he had worked out a preliminary introduction for what he intended as a major work on Aristotle.1 This essay projected the plan of the book, a plan to which he would in part adhere in his next few lecture courses. At the same time, Heidegger’s attempts to work out his own understanding of the authentic sense of phenome- nology—a phenomenology which would be an “Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity” as he titled his final Freiburg lecture course— increasingly took the form of a phenomenological interpretation of/ confrontation with Aristotle. The Aristotle book seems to have been his intention and the main focus of his research at Marburg at least through 1924, and possibly as late as early 1925.2 However, around this time there occurred an essential breakthrough in thinking, first announced in a 1924 lecture on “The Concept of Time” and elabo-
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rated at length in the 1925 summer course “History of the Concept of Time,” the so-called “first draft” of Being and Time.3 By late 1926, Heidegger had completed the draft manuscripts for Divisions I and II of Part 1 of Being and Time, which were published a year later in 1927. Heidegger himself provides some clues about what led his thinking to turn away from the book on Aristotle to Being and Time. In a 1963 retrospect, he writes “The clearer it became to me that the increasing familiarity with phenomenological seeing was fruitful for the interpretation of Aristotle’s writing, the less I could separate myself from Aristotle.”4 The more that Heidegger attempted to apply the phenomenological seeing taught by Husserl, the more it became clear to him that Aristotle himself was a master of just such phenomenological seeing. The crucial insight was that the phenomenological principle of the self-manifestation of phenomena was not only already to be found in Aristotle, but was experienced and thought even more originally therein as élÆyeia, the unconcealedness of beings in their Being. It was this insight into élÆyeia that made the question of the “whence and how” of the self-showing of beings the most urgent question for Heidegger; he says simply, “Thus I was brought to the path of the question of Being” (ibid.). But not only did Heidegger first find his way to the path of his thinking in Aristotle, he also found his initial orientation upon that path. In a 1962 letter to Father William J. Richardson, Heidegger explains that along with insight into élÆyeia as non-concealment “came recognition of the fundamental trait of oÈs¤a, the Being of beings: presence.”5 It was this insight into the Greek understanding of the Being of beings, oÈs¤a, as presence that provided the final clue and impetus for Heidegger to begin his inquiry into the relation of Time to Being:
The disquieting, ever watchful question about Being under the guise of Presence (Present) developed into the question about Being in terms of its time-character. As soon as this happened, it became clear that the tra- ditional concept of time was in no respect adequate even for correctly posing the question of the time-character of Presence, to say nothing of answer- ing it. Time became questionable in the same way as Being.6 (emphasis mine) Thereafter, Heidegger turned his efforts more and more towards the explication of the concept of time as the horizon out of which Being can be understood, and hence the projected book on Aristotle is aban- doned. Instead, we have Being and Time. One would go wrong to think it simply the case that Heidegger was particularly interested in Aristotle in the years before Being and