Chapter Two
THE DOUBLING OF PHUSIS:
ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF NATURE
Given the number of courses and texts that Heidegger devotes to Aristotle in the decade after his 1922 Introduction to the never actually written book on Aristotle, it may seem surprising that I have decided to turn first to his 1939 text, devoted to a commentary on Aristotle’s Physics B1, before discussing these other works. But, for Heidegger, the fundamental horizon of Aristotle’s philosophical questioning is the problem of movement, and it is in the Physics that Aristotle most explicitly addresses this issue. In the following chapters, we will see that Heidegger reads the Metaphysics in such a way as to highlight the centricity of the concepts of δύναμις and ἐνέργεια as ontological notions that take up the problem of movement at the very heart of Aristotle’s notion of οὐσία and his understanding of being. And even in his treatment of Aristotle’s notion of ψυχή and his reading of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in his 1924 course, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, the problem of Bewegung plays a central role in his analysis. By turning first to his reading of the meaning of φύσις in Aristotle’s philosophy, we can set the stage for the more comprehensive claim that the task that motivates Aristotle’s philosophical project in general is the study of the being of κίνησις.
Heidegger returns to Aristotle in the 1930’s, teaching, for example, a course on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ1–3 in 1931, and the 1937–1938 course on logic and Aristotle’s notion of truth called Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte Probleme der Logik.1 Although the 1939 essay, “Vom Wesen und Begriff der Φύσις: Aristoteles’ Physik B1,”2 is clearly indebted to his work on Aristotle in the 1920s, it is nevertheless not merely coincidental that he wrote this essay on Aristotle’s understanding of nature during this period, which is so much influenced by Hölderlin, for whom nature is in many ways the source of the poetic overturning of metaphysics.
1. Martin Heidegger, GA45, Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte Probleme der Logik (Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1984). English translation by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected Problems of Logic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
2. Martin Heidegger, “Vom Wesen und Begriff der Phusis: Aristoteles’ Physik B1,” in Wegmarken (Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1967). Hereafter, references to this essay will be cited as WBP and placed in parentheses directly after the quote. The page numbers refer to the original edition of Wegmarken. The Gesamtausgabe edition of this text contains no changes from the original edition. An English translation of this essay by Thomas Sheehan is available in Man and World (1976) and reprinted with changes in Pathmarks. I have benefited from this translation, though often I have offered my own English rendition. Though written in 1939, this essay first appeared in 1958 in Il Pensiero, vol. 3, #2–3 (Milan-Varese), and it was first published separately in 1960 in Testi Filosofici (Biblioteca “Il Pensiero”).