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THE TRACE OF PHRONESIS

the being of human life as such, but in its categorial structure arises from a particular ontological radicalization, already accomplished, of what it means to be moved [des Bewegtseienden]. That which is in being moved, together with the possible features of its structural meaning, is regarded in advance in terms of the exemplary kind of movement belonging to producing. Being means being finished [Fertigsein], that way of being in which movement has attained its end. The being of life is seen as intrinsically unfolding movement, and it exists in such movement when human life has come to its end with regard to its ownmost possibility of movement, that of pure apprehending. Such movement lies within the ἕξις of σοφία. (PIA, 37–38)


The "dealing" or "going about" (Umgang) with ... referred to at the beginning of this passage translates πρᾶξις, and its object is "human life itself,'' or as Heidegger had also expressed it, ''the world" (PIA, 35). Aristotle's determination of πρᾶξις, Heidegger here indicates, does not understand πρᾶξις originarily enough, in the kind of movement proper to it. Aristotle does indeed give an ontological determination of human existence as πρᾶξις, but this determination is purely formal—and this because it is already oriented by a prior understanding of being drawn from the sphere of ποίησις and τέχνη: being as being finished, being produced, being formed, that is, being understood as the kind of being intrinsic to the product when productive activity has come to a halt and the product has come to stand before us in the form of its presence-at-hand.


As Heidegger indicates here, the being of human life for Aristotle finds its proper end in the pure apprehending found in the θεωρία of σοφία. But this pure apprehending, the apprehending of pure actuality as "the divine," as the constant presence of the world, Heidegger goes on to remark, precisely turns away from human life as such (as πρᾶξις), in regarding such life as primarily a way of being that can be otherwise at any moment. The most proper possibility of human life as such is not fully human;41 human life achieves (sees) its most proper possibility only when it renounces its immediate involvements and concerns, "only in the pure accomplishment [Zeitigung] of σοφία." In this, human life comes to its own proper end—not, as Heidegger emphasizes, in that its intrinsic movement ceases—but precisely in seeing itself as movement and thus properly being movement:


Every movement, as βαδισις εἰς—being underway toward—by its very meaning entails not yet having reached that toward which it moves; it exists precisely as a proceeding toward its


41Cf. Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice, 26ff.


The Glance of the Eye by William McNeill