MARTIN HEIDEGGER’S RELATIONSHIP TO ARISTOTLE ● 19

standing of factical life. The failure to think this twofold in its character as a doubling movement led to a splitting of the analysis into two different movements—something like apophantic circumspection and something like intuitive contemplation. In other words, a dualistic interpretation of human life replaced Aristotle’s understanding of human life as held in a double regard. That is not to say that the seeds of this misunderstanding are not already found in Aristotle to some extent, in his insistence that σοφία is a higher way of revealing than even the disclosing that emerges out of the doubling regard of φρόνησις.

Let us look then at Aristotle’s treatment of σοφία, wisdom. In contrast to his rather approving attitude with regard to Aristotle’s understanding of φρόνησις, Heidegger’s treatment of that other noetic activity, σοφία, is ambiguous. He clearly attempts to show that σοφία has to do with divine movement, not the movement of living being. The mistake that has pervaded the tradition, namely, interpreting all being on the basis of what is revealed in σοφία has its roots in a certain theological bias, as Heidegger laid out in an earlier part of this text. But it also can be traced to a certain ambiguity on the part of Aristotle. To a certain extent, Aristotle’s concern about the eternal and necessary movement of divine being causes him to define living being in terms of what it is not, that is, in terms of its not being necessary and eternal. This covers over, to some extent, the more original and positive access to the peculiar kind of movement and being that is involved in the case of living beings. Among the many Heideggerian notions that come into play in his 1922 Aristotle essay is the notion of authenticity. Hermeneutic philosophy is inauthentic when it imposes structures from outside on what is being investigated, rather than following the movement from out of itself, and making this movement of facticity explicit in its origin.

But, more important, Heidegger also finds that the dominant concern with the movement of production—with τέχνη and ποίησις—and the use of produced beings as exemplary beings in Greek ontology has its roots in this same failure to properly distinguish σοφία and φρόνησις. For, σοφία is also the appropriate basis for the way of revealing that is involved in τέχνη. In other words, art is governed by a kind of understanding of σοφία. σοφία is a privative way of revealing that requires a looking away from the beings as they are revealed in circumspective dealings and replacing it instead with a way of dealing with beings that involves a kind of bare care-less looking. When beings from τέχνη become the exemplary beings for the analysis of living being, then the double regard and the double movement that we discussed earlier, the movement of those beings whose


Walter Brogan - Heidegger and Aristotle