ὁμολογούμεναι οὐσίαι(!).25 “It looks as though being shows itself in the most obvious of beings, which we call the σώματα”: ζῷα, φυτά, τὰ φυσικά σώματα, οὐρανός, ἄστρα, σελήνη, ἥλιος—“the bodies.” What this means for the Greeks is not primarily having-the-matter-of-stuff, materiality, but rather a specifically obtrusive there-character. Hence, later: τὸ σὸν σῶμα = σύ, “you” there, with which I now have to do; σῶμα: the “slave,” the “captive,” what stands directly at my disposal, is present. The aforementioned beings are the sort about which everyone speaks in agreement with others, one says of them, without qualification, that they “are,” i.e., that they satisfy the sense of being that guides the addressing of beings as being. “One without qualification” a definite intelligibility of what one means by being. But that is a being that initially and for the most part is there in and out of the world, what is encountered in everydayness, wherein the everyday operates and maintains itself. Οὐσίαι plural! A research that examines the being of beings will, accordingly, insofar as it rests on it, be grounded and not discourse phantastically, maintaining itself initially in such beings: ὁμολογοῦνται δ᾽ οὐσίαι εἶναι τῶν αισθητῶν τινές, ὥστ’ ἐν ταύταις ζητητέον πρῶτον.26 Perception along the way, the sense contains manifold concepts [?].27
[Ad 1.]28 How such research looks will be pursued later in a concrete way, according to its individual steps. For now, we are asking the more systematic question, what comes to light in it as to the being-characters—i.e., according to the multifariousness of the meaning of οὐσία in the first direction of meaning: being-ness. More precisely, we are asking: are the being-characters there-characters, and specifically such that in some way stem from the sense of the there that we have come across in the customary meaning of οὐσία?
The customary orientation as to the being-characters is one that we take on the basis of Metaphysics Δ 8. At the beginning of this chapter, the beings mentioned above are listed for the purposes of designation, and in such a way that, at the same time, a being-character is gleaned from them. They are ὑποκείμενα,29 what already is lying there before all else. Their being means being-at-hand, and at-hand, always already something met with and addressed, insofar as they are to be discussed more in depth.
1. Thus, there results the there-character of presence-at-hand, presentness. In this case, not in the emphatic sense of what is most immediately and urgently at hand, in the sense of the household, but rather presence-at-hand of that toward which the estate stands, ground and soil, land, animals, plants,
25. Met. Η 1, 1042 a 6 sqq.: οὐσίαι [. . .] ὁμολογούμεναι
26. Met. Ζ 3, 1029 a 33 sq.
27. Editor’s note: The reading of the last nine words, written in shorthand on the manuscript, is uncertain.
28. Insertion by the editor.
29. Met. Δ 8, 1017 b 13 sq.: οὐ καθ’ ὑποκεινένου λέγεται, ἀλλὰ κατὰ τούτων τἆλλα.