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§10. The Being-There of Human Beings as ἐνέργεια [66–67]


ourselves of the determinations of the being of human beings that we have acquired thus far:

1. Ζωή: the being of human beings is being-in-a-world. (You may suppose that this is intimated in Aristotle, but perhaps you will see only later on that interpretation is nothing other than setting forth what is not prominently there.)

2. This being-in-a-world is characterized by λόγος.

3. This speaking is itself the mode of fulfillment of a concern, of a concernful mode of involving oneself in the world. Being-in-a-world is equiprimordially concern.

4. This concern itself always has an end securely in place, toward which concern reckons that which is conducive; it possesses that which it approaches in a definite anticipation. Αἴσθησιν ἔχει: concern is characterized as lookingaround. From here there arises, in everydayness, the possibility of “mere looking-out toward . . . ,” of θεωρεῖν.

5. This being is, explicitly speaking, in itself being-with-one-another, being-in-the-πόλις.

We must now hold fast to this basic structure. You must familiarize yourselves with it, not by learning it by heart but so that these things show up in your concrete being-there, so that they make themselves clear therein.

a) The Explicitness of the ἀγαθόν


α. The Explicitness of the ἀγαθόν as Such in τέχνη


Where do we find the ἀγαθόν explicitly? The first sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics throws light on this: Πᾶσα τέχνη καὶ πᾶσα μέθοδος, ὁμοίως δὲ πρᾶξις τε καὶ προαίρεσις ἀγαθόν τινος ἐφίεσθαι δοκεῖ.34 “It appears that every τέχνη (knowing-one’s-way-around something, in a definite mode of concern; the shoemaker understands how one makes a shoe, he knows his way around in it), every knowing-one’s-way in a concern, every μέθοδος, every pursuing-of-amatter, being-on-the-way after a matter (yet again, a mode of being-oriented, of knowing-one’s-way-around)—in the same way, the concern and the occupying oneself with something that is to be settled, that is to be brought to an end through concern—all these modes of knowing-one’s-way-around and of concern about something, appear to be after some good.” This ἐφίεσθαι, this “being-after,” belongs to its being itself. As knowing-one’s-way-around, concern about something has an ἀγαθόν within itself, explicitly there. Concern is not something different than, and so only accidentally, a being-after. These characters of τέχνη, πρᾶξις, μέθοδος, and προαίρεσις are phenomena that we already know; they appear again later in the Nicomachean Ethics, in the combinations τέχνη/πρᾶξις,35 προαίρεσις/γνῶσις.36 This doubling of determinations


34. Eth. Nic. Α 1, 1094 a 1 sq.

35. Eth. Nic. Α 5, 1097 a 16: πράξει καὶ τέχνῃ.

36. Eth. Nic. Α 2, 1095 a 14: γνῶσις καὶ προαίρεσις.


Martin Heidegger (GA 18) Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy

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