be the sort of thing in which the body does not take part.] If, however, even νοεῖν [the thorough deliberating of a matter, when I do not have it perceptually present] is something like a φαντασία or cannot be without φαντασία, then thinking too could not be without standing in the context of the entire life of a human being.” Thinking: this is not an appeal to a brain process, but to φαντασία, the “making-present-to-itself” of the world, in which what is made present is not actually there, but instead is, say, in memory or in a merely faint making-present. Even in thinking about something, the matters are there in the making-present. Φαντασία is the ground for νοεῖν. Insofar as νόησις is the highest possibility for the being of human beings, the entire being of human beings is determined so that it must be apprehended as the bodily being-in-the-world of human beings.
What was, here, provided by Aristotle, is still not taken advantage of today. Only in phenomenology has this begun. No division between “psychic” and “bodily acts”! This is to be seen practically, for example, in the way that I move my hand, the way that I make a movement with it. One must note that the primary being-there-function of bodiliness secures the ground for the full being of human beings. The beginnings of the entire tradition’s erroneous orientation toward the biological (Descartes’s res cogitans—res extensa) is also found in Aristotle.
Aristotle proceeds from four general meanings of πάθος: (1) changeable constitution, (2) of which there is a special meaning, (3) as that which tones life down, (4) πάθος, especially as harmful: adversity, a blow. It must be shown to what extent phenomena like fear, anger, and so on, live up to what we have set forth as general determinations of πάθος; and also in what sense the πάθη are to be considered as γινόμενα τῆς ψυχῆς.
Aristotle begins De Anima with the question of how what is meant by ψυχή is to be understood and determined, in order to gain the correct προτάσεις from which the scope of the being-contexts of living things is to be constituted. Ψυχή means all that constitutes the being of a living thing, as that which constitutes being, that is itself something. Thus the manifoldness of being-contexts is subordinated to a determinate manifoldness of determinate object-categories. The question in relation to which Aristotle discusses the πάθη is: How can something occur to a living thing regarding its being? And is everything that can occur to living things to be taken as belonging to their way of being as such? Or are there also determinations of the ability-to-occur to living things that befit, in a peculiar sense, a way of being of living things themselves—ψυχή and ἄνθρωπος?
In the background of this altogether general question stands the phenomenon that Aristotle designates as νοῦς. The concrete question (which Aristotle addresses, but does not fully answer, in De Anima, Book 3, Chapters 4–5) is how the being of the human being is determined in the genuine sense as being-in-the-world. It asks whether the being of human beings as having-the-world-there-opened, discoveredness, openedness of being-in-the-world; whether and