Heidegger’s basic point is to insist that, in Aristotle’s philosophy, the “nature” of beings as a whole is always implicitly addressed when we concern ourselves with an understanding of nature. A hint of this is still contained in our other use of the word nature, when we speak of, for example, the nature of the human being. Heidegger’s aim in his reading of Aristotle is to show the inseparability of the question of being and the question of nature. For Aristotle, the turn to metaphysics is not a question of leaving behind the subject matter of the Physics in order to explore the sense of another realm of being. Rather, Heidegger says, the study of being in the sense of beings as a whole is called meta-physics, the science that goes after natural beings, namely, the science of φύσις, the knowledge of nature. For similar reasons, Heidegger makes the rather provocative claim that the “differentiation of ‘nature and spirit’ is a completely non-Greek dichotomy” (WBP 313). That is, the Greeks did not think of science as an activity of spirit that examined a certain group of available objects. This way of conceiving of the separation of subject and object is no longer attuned to the phenomenological sense of being Heidegger recovers in his study of Aristotle.
Finally, Heidegger alludes in the beginning of this essay to our own age and to his interpretation of technology and the global planning of modern times and says that today the world is shifting out of joint (WBP 312). The nexus of the relationality of human being and nature is being replaced by a notion of world order. In technology, the human being’s orientation toward beings brings to fulfillment the withdrawal of being.5 For Heidegger, the issue of world is fundamental to an understanding of nature. Heidegger attributes the birth of technology to a reductive transformation of the Aristotelian sense of nature, causality, and motion. Heidegger’s claim that the world is out of joint implies that the interconnectedness and relationality at the heart of what is, and the understanding of which is necessary in order to ask about nature, is endangered in our time and replaced by planning. One of Heidegger’s strategies for coping with this danger is to raise anew the question of the relationship between φύσις and τέχνη in Aristotle’s philosophy.
Heidegger’s Ontological Interpretation of Movement in Aristotle’s Philosophy
Heidegger begins his discussion of Physics B1 with a quote from Physics A2, 185a 12ff: “But from the outset it should be (a settled issue) for us
5. For an amplication of this point, see Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske Verlag, 1978), 9–40. “The Question Concerning Technology,” trans. W. Lovitt, in Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1993), 307–343.