that attention has been diverted far away from the genuine problem. This is the doctrine of ὕλη and εἶδος, of matter and form. In the usual conception, and often with seemingly just reference to Aristotle's words, the actuality of a thing consists in the actualization of its form, εἶδος, in matter. The form of the chair, which the craftsman must previously imagine in his mind, εἶδος, ἰδέα, is actualized in matter, e.g. in wood. And then one wonders about how a 'spiritual' form can be located in something material. People think it particularly characteristic of Aristotle that he brought idea (form), located by Plato in a supersensible world, back to matter and the things themselves. This common interpretation of Aristotle's philosophy, which one can find in any decent textbook, does not recognize the childishness which it attributes to both Plato and' Aristotle, and simply repeats everything that has been said since philosophy declined – to the level of compilers and schools – from the heights achieved by these two thinkers. To do the history of philosophy in this way would be analogous to deriving our interpretation of Kant from what a journalist wrote at the 1924 Kant jubilee.
However, what is the situation with respect to this actualization of form in matter (whereby the actuality of the thing is to be secured)? First, this fails to clarify the essence of actuality unless one previously indicates what actualization is supposed to mean. Further, it is not an interpretation of the Greek concept of actuality unless it has been shown that the Greeks understand actuality from the act of actualization, which is precisely not the case. Above all, however, these discussions concerning form and matter continue and proliferate without ever appropriating the standpoint, or even asking about it, within which εἶδος and ὕλη are supposed to illuminate the actuality of the real. It is not a matter of the embodiment of form in substance, nor of the process of production of beings, but of that which resides in the producedness of the produced thing. The question concerns the way in which workhood must be conceived if it is to announce the being of beings. The answer is that precisely the look [Aussehen] of the thing comes to expression in its producedness. ουσία, the being-present of a being as actually present, consists in the napoucria of the diioc;, i.e. in the presence of its look. Actuality means producedness, there-standingness as the presence of its look .9
When Kant goes on to say that we do not know the thing-in-itself, i.e. that we do not have an absolute intuition of this but only see an appearance, he does not mean that we grasp a pseudo-actuality
9 See below pp. 51 ff. on the ὄν ὡς ἀληθής, and on Meta. Θ, 10 in particular.
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