movement makes it difficult to understand the “ontological” significance that Aristotle attaches to metabolē. Aristotle gives examples of motion and lists movement with respect to place, increase and decrease, and alteration as examples. Heidegger has unique insights into each of these kinds of motion, but we will focus on the meaning of locomotion. Heidegger says that this sense of motion has come to mean movement pure and simple, thereby making it impossible to read Aristotle’s Physics properly. When beings are taken as simply there in space, then motion is understood in terms of change of position in space. But movement of location is one, among other, types of movement, “not movement pure and simple” (WBP 318). A being can stay put and still change through increase or alteration, for example. Besides that, the Greek sense of place or topos has been understood to refer to spatial location and thus movement has been considered only in terms of change of position in space. But the Greeks had no notion like our modern notion of “location of a mass in space.” Space rather is understood as the “place” of a being. A natural being for Aristotle is never reducible to its material extension. It is always a concrete being, a todē ti, a “this” (Met. 1003 a8). Only that which is a being can take its place and leave it. Place is not an indifferent container that defines the being. Rather, the being arrives in its place and thereby its place first comes to be. Aristotle defines place as to peras, limit or boundary (Physics 212 a7) of the surrounding body. The boundary, Heidegger says, is that at which something begins its essential unfolding (Wesen).19 The place is the limit of a separate, embodied being. This is why Aristotle speaks of relations such as contact, touch, and succession whenever he discusses place. Only an embodied physical being is capable of touching and reaching out toward its proper realm. It is because the being is a body, and thus is separate and yet belongs to a koinon, a community with other beings, in such a way that it can interact and exchange with others, that movement is possible. In other words, the fundamental cause of these movements is the way of being of those beings that can move. This way of being is bodily. The difficulty Aristotle faces, the stumbling block of Greek philosophy, is to show how beings can endure and still have movement as their way of being. A being comes forth into its place, and grants itself a place by gathering itself into appearance as a whole that endures in its being.
The understanding of the being of natural beings that is beginning to take shape in our discussion is that only a being that endures, stands, and is held in its telos can be. Only as a unity can a being be. And yet natural beings, which are moving beings, cannot be simply one. Aristotle has shown