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CONFRONTING THE ONTOLOGICAL TRADITION

movement, that of usage and "custom" (Brauch). What then is the relationship of λέγειν and εἶναι? Aristotle's critique of the sentence (i.e., λόγος) ἓν τὰ πάντα provides initial insight into this focal question of the Greeks. Such a λόγος is first ἀπόφανσις, a saying from out of something, which is why λόγος is itself a fundamental part of ἀρχή-research. But λόγος primarily has something to say, it is toward something, the taking-as of something, which motivates a multiplicity in the field of being.

One sees this multiplicity finally in the analysis of τὸ ὃπερ ὄν (Physics 1. 3; Aristotle coined the phrase), 'just being," the "always-somehow-being-something," in relation to the "central concept" of συμβεβηκός (accident). The course concludes with an in-depth discussion of what Aristotle means by ὃν κατὰ συμβεβηκός, being in the mode of happening-along-with. Heidegger makes much of one example in Metaphysics 6.2, 1026b6-10: the true being of a house is to be found in the production which gives it existence and form. The multiplicity of the further hows of the extant house do not belong to its true (produced) being: whether it is comfortable or harmful to some, useful to others, and, at its extreme, different from anything else that is. All of these are "incidental" to the house as produced. The oddity of this narrow conception of the "look" of a house equated to its producedness, including the making of a shape but excluding all other environmental significations such as its inhabitability, stems from Aristotle's theoretical concerns. Indeed, Aristotle goes on to observe that such "accidental" attributes are not only not amenable to theory but also border on nonbeing (b22). The incidental is saved from oblivion only by making it the terminus of λέγειν, by having it "fall to" something, hardly an uncommon way of speaking about being.

The λόγος thus proves to be a more original being than the just-being. Its multiplicity points the way to the multiplicity of equiprimordial whences which prove to be irreducible to simplicity.


OCTOBER 1922: THE EINLEITUNG TO A BOOK ON ARISTOTLE

In the midst of this linked pair of courses on "Phenomenological Interpretations to Aristotle," in January of 1922, word came from Marburg that Paul Natorp would be retiring shortly, that Nicolai Hartmann would be taking his place, and that as a result the junior position in philosophy would once again be vacant. Natorp had been impressed by Heidegger's book on Duns Scotus and, on the strength of this one publication, had considered Heidegger for this position in both 1917 and 1920. By 1922, Heidegger was renowned in university circles throughout Germany as an outstanding teacher. But he had published nothing since the Scotus book and, moreover, remarks Husserl in a letter to Natorp on February 1, 1922, "does not want to publish yet," adding that this "highly original


Theodore Kisiel - The Genesis of Being and Time