Heidegger and Aristotle: The Twofoldness of Being (original) (raw)

A fi rst generation of Heidegger's students were quick to identify the importance for him of Aristotle's philosophy. Th ey had sat in his lectures and seminars from the early twenties, fi rst in Freiburg im-Breisgau, in Marburg, and again in Freiburg: they heard Heidegger's protracted discussions of Aristotle's texts. Th e title of one set of lectures, from 1921 give a sense of the direction of the reading: Phenomenological Interpretation of Aristotle: Introduction to Phenomenological Research (GA 61, 1984). Aristotle's writings were to be read as a source for following through and radicalising the phenomenological innovations of Edmund Husserl (1856-1938). Heidegger himself, in the late essay 'On Time and Being' (1962), testifi es to the importance for his earliest development of the gift, in 1907, of a study by Franz Brentano: On the manifold senses of being for Aristotle (1862). Th is preoccupation with the manifold senses of being, which must all the same be thought as a unity, can be linked to the diff erences between the unity of logos, as Rede, and its various modes of being said, as Gerede, which is structural to the development of the argument of Being and Time (1927). Th is distinction between Gerede and Rede informs the analysis of the diff erences between the tendency to fallenness into the world, and an authentic self-attestation of Dasein, in its ontical and ontological distinctiveness, as having a relation to its own being. In this fi rst generation of students, the work of Helena Weiss, Hans Georg Gadamer, Otto Poeggeler, and Hannah Arendt all attest to the challenge posed by Heidegger's writings. Th e task is to return to Aristotle, under the guidance of a retrieval of the question of the meaning of being, both to work through to an understanding of the unity of Aristotle's thinking, and to develop alternatives in the twentieth century to the dead ends of Cartesian dualism. By contrast, a second and a third generation of students have access to the famous early lectures and seminars only by second hand, by means of rumour, and in the outline of a critique of Aristotle, indicated, but not carried out in Being and Time. Th e proposal to destroy the history of ontology sits uneasily alongside this claim, from section 29, about Aristotle's Rhetoric: 'Contrary to the traditional orientation, according to which rhetoric is conceived as the kind of thing we "learn in school", this work of Aristotle must be taken as the fi rst systematic hermeneutic of the everydayness of Being with one another.' (SZ 138, MR 178).Th e destruction of Aristotelian ontology is to reveal an Aristotle who contributes to reposing the question of the meaning of being, and to an analysis of the everydayness of Dasein. Th is opens up a duplicity in Aristotle's texts, they are to be read against the grain, to release a hermeneutical component, in addition to the question concerning the unity, or meaning, articulating the multiplicity in being.