Double Arche: Heidegger's Reading of Aristotle's Kinetic Ontology
The central topic that pervades Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle, and the one above all others that demonstrates his knowledge and insight, is the topic of kineˆsis.1 For Heidegger, the problem of movement and the question of the ontological character of moving beings was the fundamental question of Aristotle’s philosophy. Aristotle’s metaphysics entered into this basic aporia that governed the experience of being in ancient Greece, the difficulty of thinking of the being of motion, the denial of ontological kineˆsis. He was able to grasp, on the basis of this question, the meaning of being and thereby to bring to its end the philosophical struggle of his times. Heidegger claims not only that Aristotle’s Physics, wherein the problem of movement is central, is the neveradequately studied, foundational book of Western Philosophy, but also that in Physics B1, Aristotle gives ‘‘the interpretation of phusis that sustains and guides all succeeding interpretations of the essence of ‘nature.’ ’’2 Both of these assertions are rather overarching, and the implications of their possible legitimacy are rather enormous. Combined with his additional claim that, for Aristotle, metaphysics is as much physics as physics is metaphysics, we can conclude that for Heidegger, the perspective within which the Metaphysics should be read is the question of nature.
|Main Author:||Brogan, Walter|